Elastic 8.0 marks a significant update to the Elasticsearch platform, offering enhanced vector search capabilities, native support for natural language processing (NLP) models, and improved data onboarding and security features. This release aims to provide faster, more scalable, and relevant search experiences by integrating modern NLP models directly into Elasticsearch, enabling tasks like sentiment analysis and text classification without additional coding. The platform also introduces approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search for efficient vector-based queries and expands cloud-native observability with new Amazon Web Services (AWS) integrations. Additionally, Elastic 8.0 simplifies security by enabling it by default for self-managed clusters, ensuring data protection and ease of configuration. These advancements are available through Elastic Cloud, with new users offered a 14-day free trial to explore the full range of features.