How to use NEST/elasticsearch with Azure?

Question

I got a website (Web App) running on Azure (example.azurewebsites.net) and I want to use NEST (http://nest.azurewebsites.net) in my Asp.Net MVC solution. Locally it works fine, but when publishing it to Azure, I can't get a connection to elasticsearch. Because I did not found any useful tutorial, I mixed three together.

First I created a virtual network like described here in Step 1: http://www.kerrb.com/ecAzureVms101/day4-creating-point-to-site-vpn-to-azure-virtual-machines I called it VirtualNetwork and got a Gateway-IP-Adress. It shows me that 1 Client is connected.

Then I created a virtual machine like described here: http://code972.com/blog/2014/07/74-the-definitive-guide-for-elasticsearch-on-windows-azure I already had the virtual network, so I skipped the first step here. The cloud service got the name example-elastic-search (example-elastic-search.cloudapp.net) I called the virtual machine elasticsearchvm. I connected via putty, configured elasticsearch like described and I it works fine.

The last step with Azure was to connect the Web App with the virtual network. I did it like this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2015/04/07/step-by-step-connect-an-azure-web-app-to-an-existing-virtual-network.aspx

Finally I changed my code to use the elasticsearchvm.

new ElasticClient(new ConnectionSettings(new Uri("http://example-elastic-search.cloudapp.net")))

Instead of example-elastic-search.cloudapp.net I also tried the name of the virtual machine (elasticsearchvm), the internal and public IPs of the VM, the IP of the cloud service and the IP of the gateway. All of these with http, https, the port and without the port (9200). Nothing worked.

Any ideas, what I have missed? If more informations are needed, feel free to ask :)

Answer 1

I realise that this is not directly answering your question, but I think this is useful to mention for those finding this question in future. The easiest way to get up and running with Elasticsearch on Azure is to use Elastic's ARM template; I wrote a blog post about some of the features available within the template.

The template can be deployed from within the portal UI or using the Azure CLI; the former is good for getting started and playing around, and the latter is useful to integrate the template into your automation environment of choice. You can of course clone/fork the repository and make changes to the template to suit your requirements.

When adding Elasticsearch to an existing web application, the deployed cluster can be attached to an existing virtual network in the same location; you just need to specify

• the name of the network
• the name of the subnet
• the name of the resource group containing the network
• An available IP address to use for the internal load balancer

You'll need enough available IP addresses on the network for the cluster you're deploying.