While the overall numbers are not necessarily sexy, the percentage growth surely is. If you are looking for a tool to search and analyze data, Elastic stack and Splunk are showing exponential gains in the last couple of years. Therefore, if you are currently a DevOps engineer or looking to take your career in that direction, it is essential that you familiarize yourself with the Elastic stack or Splunk.

In order to analyze the Elastic stack, we broke it down into its main three components: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. While all three separately have grown over 40% over the course of the last year, it is essential to put the trio together to get the full extent of their growth trajectory. In that case, we have seen a growth rate that has exceeded 150% since the latter part of 2015. Truly remarkable. While that is surely impressive, let's even break down the numbers further. The data tells us that the bulk of the growth occurred in the last three months. Each of the components grew from the time period of October 2015 to October 2016, but the growth was fairly tepid. However, once you break down each component from October 2016 to January 2017, the gains are absolutely astonishing. And, putting the stack components together, one will see a 50% gain in just a three month stretch. Therefore, the trend of using this tool to analyze data is only gaining momentum. And, it is showing no signs of slowing down.

While the percentage growth is not quite on the level of the Elastic stack, the overall numbers displayed by Splunk are just as impressive, if not more so. It is clearly evident that the number of employment postings that include Splunk tend to trump Elastic stack. More than likely, this is due in part to Splunk being a publicly traded company, as well as having first mover advantage in the data analytics field. Nonetheless, the growth rate for Splunk nears 65% over the last 15 months. And, whereas the Elastic stack has seen a surge in the past three months, Splunk has had a fairly consistent growth rate over the period being analyzed. Common sense would tend to hypothesize one as being more mature than the other, which in this case is exactly true. Thus, the looming question. Which direction as a DevOps Engineer should I head? In all honesty, it appears you can not go wrong either way. Both are showing exceptional growth trajectories, with neither one showing any signs of waning. It is essentially a Coke vs. Pepsi argument. It boils down to consumer preference.

If you tend to value one tool more than the other, focus on that specific one. The data thus far is showing you can not make a bad decision. You can just feel confident that you are focusing your attention on an area growing feverishly, which can never be a bad thing for career opportunities.