Elastic is announcing the general availability of Elastic 9.0 and 8.18. The 9.x series is expected to be even more impressive than the 8.x series, which introduced features like ANN, TSDB, and ES|QL. Elastic 9.0 is built on Lucene 10.0 and brings faster performance and greater efficiency to Elasticsearch and its core solutions, including Elastic Observability and Elastic Security. The upgrade is thanks to Lucene 10.0's built-in improvements, such as better parallelism, smarter indexing, and hardware optimizations. These enhancements have a noticeable impact on resource optimizations and what Elastic 9.0 can do. For those not ready to upgrade to 9.0, many of its new features are also available in version 8.18, including Better Binary Quantization, Elastic Distributions of OpenTelemetry, and ES|QL LOOKUP JOIN. Elastic Cloud Serverless is also available, providing a fast way to start and scale security, observability, and search solutions without managing infrastructure. This includes all the features mentioned above. The 9.0 release marks a major upgrade for Elasticsearch and its core solutions. Overall, both Elastic 9.0 and 8.18 offer significant improvements and new features for users.