Elastic Stack 7.17 marks the final release of the 7.x series, featuring a new and enhanced Upgrade Assistant designed to facilitate a seamless transition to version 8.0 by addressing Elasticsearch and Kibana deprecations with both automated and manual remediation options. This version enhances performance and scalability, introduces deduplication to optimize data storage, and updates Docker images from CentOS 8 to Ubuntu 20.04 due to the former's end of support. As Elastic prepares for the more advanced features in 8.0, such as vector search and modern NLP, users are encouraged to upgrade to 7.17 to ensure a smooth transition. The release is available on Elastic Cloud, offering the latest in search, analysis, and visualization capabilities, along with self-managed options through Elastic Cloud Enterprise and Elastic Cloud for Kubernetes.