Elasticsearch 6.0.0-alpha2 has been released as the second pre-release version in preparation for the upcoming 6.0.0 release, built on Lucene 7-SNAPSHOT. This alpha version is intended solely for testing purposes, and users are encouraged to provide feedback on any issues encountered. Notable features in this release include the introduction of the significant_text aggregation for more efficient text field analysis, the new ip_range field type for indexing IPv6 address ranges, and the icu_collation_keyword field type for language-specific sorting. Additionally, this release continues efforts to remove support for multiple mapping types and improve fast replica recovery through sequence numbers. Users are advised against deploying this version in production environments, as indices created will not be compatible with the final 6.0.0 release, and upgrading from 6.0.0-alpha2 to other versions is unsupported.