Elasticsearch is a distributed, open source search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene. It allows storing, searching, and analyzing big volumes of data quickly. Elasticsearch uses an inverted index to search text, and indexes documents into shards and replicas for scalability and fault tolerance. Write operations in Elasticsearch are logged in a transaction log and memory buffer before being flushed to segments on disk. Updates create a new version rather than modifying documents in place. Reads are routed to shards, sorted, and returned to the client from the coordinating node.