Elastic Stack has released its second public alpha version, 8.0.0-alpha2, following the first release a month prior, with significant updates including 580 pull requests for Elasticsearch alone and a planned upgrade to Lucene 9. Users are cautioned that this alpha version is not suitable for production environments and may not be compatible with future releases or the eventual general availability version. The release is not yet available on Elastic Cloud, but a preview version is expected soon. Elastic encourages users to participate in its Pioneer Program by testing this alpha version across various components such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash, and APM, and reporting any bugs to help enhance the release's robustness. Participants in the program may receive unique rewards once a stable version is released.