Elasticsearch 7.13 introduces significant performance enhancements, particularly for terms and date_histogram aggregations, by internally rewriting them as filters, leading to substantial speed improvements. One notable optimization involves reading counts directly from index metadata instead of performing searches, achieving a 3.5x speed boost in some cases, as demonstrated by a reduction in request time from 130ms to 37ms on a 33 million document index. These optimizations are especially beneficial for older shards on slower storage mediums, and although they primarily enhance top-level aggregations, they also apply to sub-aggregations like max or avg. While the new version does not yet optimize nested aggregations, it represents a promising step forward, and the potential for future enhancements remains high. Users can access these improvements with Elasticsearch 7.13, available on Elastic Cloud.