Elasticsearch 5.6.1, based on Lucene 6.6.1, has been released as the latest stable version available for deployment on Elastic Cloud, the platform's Elasticsearch-as-a-service offering. Users are encouraged to download and try out this version, and provide feedback on Twitter or the forum, with any issues reportable on GitHub. The release comes with accompanying release notes for both Elasticsearch and X-Pack 5.6.1, while highlighting the changes introduced in version 5.5.