Shay Banon created Compass in 2004.[1] While thinking about the third version of Compass he realized that it would be necessary to rewrite big parts of Compass to "create a scalable search solution".[1] So he created "a solution built from the ground up to be distributed" and used a common interface, JSON over HTTP, suitable for programming languages other than Java as well.[1] Shay Banon released the first version of Elasticsearch in February 2010.[2]