The Couchbase plug-in for Elasticsearch enables you to provide full-text search in your application using the open source search engine, Elasticsearch. This means that your users can retrieve application documents from Couchbase Server based on text in your documents. For instance if you provide a product catalog, users can find items based on text descriptions of the products.

You use Couchbase Server with Elasticsearch to provide quality, rapid full-text search results. The data model for Elasticsearch is already very compatible with the schema-free, document-oriented model used by Couchbase Server. Since search is often a more CPU-intensive process, you can scale your Elasticsearch cluster separately from your Couchbase cluster to best meet the demands of your users. In doing so, search functions will not slow the performance of Couchbase Server reads or writes.