Sign up for Elastic Cloud using https://www.elastic.co/cloud/as-a-service/signup, provide your email address, and verify your email. You will be asked to set your initial password.
After your initial password is set, you can log in to the Elastic Cloud console at https://cloud.elastic.co. The Elastic Cloud console offers an easy-to-use user interface to manage your clusters. Since you just signed up for a trial account, you can create a free cluster during the trial period.
We can choose a name for your trial cluster. You will also be able to choose AWS (Amazon Web Services) or GCE (Google Compute Engine) while launching the cluster. Upon logging in, you can create a cluster from the following screen:
After selecting the cloud platform, you can choose a region for your cluster.
Select the version to be the latest 7.x version that is available. At the time of writing this book, version 7.1.0 is the latest version available on Elastic Cloud. You have the option of choosing either I/O Optimized, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, or Hot-Warm Architecture deployment. Different types of clusters are suitable for different use cases.
When you click the the Create deployment button, your cluster will be created and started with production-grade configuration. The cluster will be secured. It will also start with a Kibana instance. At this point, it should provide you with a username/password to be used for logging into your Elasticsearch and Kibana nodes. Please note it down. It also provides a Cloud ID, which is a helpful string when connecting to your cloud cluster from your Beats agents and Logstash servers.
You can click under the Deployments text where you will see the name with which you created your deployment. In this case, we called it test-cluster. If you click on that, you should see a screen that has a summary of your deployment:
As you can see, the cluster is up and running. In the second tab, Kibana, you can get the URL at which it is accessible. The Elasticsearch cluster is available at the given secured HTTPS URL.
The cluster has two nodes: one in each AWS availability zone and one tiebreaker node. The tiebreaker node helps to elect a master node. Tiebreaker nodes are special nodes on Elastic Cloud that help in the re-election of masters whenever some nodes become unreachable in the cluster.
Now that we have the cluster up and running with a Kibana instance, let's use it!