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Elastic wins 2025 Google Cloud DORA Award for Architecting for the Future with AI

Applying DORA principles to improve software delivery and operational performance with Google Cloud

By

Brian Bergholm,

Lon Holden,

Aleta Hubbell,

Valerio Arvizzigno,

Yuvraj Gupta

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We’re thrilled to announce that Elastic has been honored with the 2025 Google Cloud DORA Award for Architecting for the Future with AI. 

Google Cloud DORA awards recognize organizations that have demonstrated significant advancements by applying DORA principles to improve their software delivery and operational performance with Google Cloud.

As we scaled our engineering teams at Elastic, we realized the need for a more data-driven approach to DevOps performance. We turned to Google Cloud’s DORA framework to guide our efforts and measure impact. Our receipt of this award is a testament to our improvements in the velocity, reliability, and quality of our software delivery processes on behalf of our customers. The same approach continues through the innovation and challenges of the new AI architectures that Elastic and Google Cloud are strongly working with.

What is DORA?

DORA is a program run by Google Cloud. It’s the largest and longest running research program of its kind. It seeks to understand the capabilities that drive software delivery and operations performance. Through research in these areas, DORA helps teams apply those capabilities, ultimately leading to better organizational performance.

what is dora

DORA's research has already shown that AI is transforming every stage of the software development lifecycle with 76% of technologists reporting that they rely on AI in their daily work. DORA findings indicate that when organizations are transparent about their AI strategy and create policies to govern its adoption, they see a significant increase in the use of these powerful, new tools. Research has also shown that AI can have a positive impact on developer well-being, leading to higher job satisfaction and less burnout. However, it does acknowledge that organizations must be mindful of how AI affects the perceived value of development work.

AI tools facilitate the implementation of DORA practices

At Elastic, we use advanced AI tools from our partnership with Google Cloud to enhance software development, delivery, and operations.

Through our close partnership with Google Cloud, Elastic became the first ISV directly integrated into Vertex AI’s UI and SDK. Our vector database and Elastic Inference API integrated with Google Cloud’s embedding, reranking, and completion models accelerate development by enabling faster, more accurate semantic search that reduces lead time through faster feature iteration and testing.

DORA performance improvements through AI

AI has significantly improved Elastic’s performance across DORA’s four key metrics:

  • Deployment frequency: AI-powered tools like Elastic’s Playground accelerate feature prototyping, testing, and deployment, enabling faster and more frequent releases.

  • Lead time for changes: Semantic search powered by our vector database combined with AI-driven code insights reduces development and review times, shortening lead times from commit to production.

  • Change failure rate: AI-assisted monitoring and anomaly detection in our security and observability solutions proactively identify issues before they impact production, lowering failure rates.

  • Mean time to recovery (MTTR): AI-driven diagnostics and automated remediation workflows enable rapid detection and resolution of incidents, drastically reducing MTTR.

By embedding AI across its development and operations, Elastic delivers faster, safer, and more reliable software aligned with DORA best practices.

Measurable business impact

Elastic’s work with Google Cloud has delivered measurable business impacts in terms of growth, cost savings, productivity, customer satisfaction, and sustainability.

  • Cost savings: Automation and optimized cloud resource utilization reduced operational expenses by ~20%, enabling us to reinvest in innovation and accelerate product development.

  • Operational efficiency: By enabling autoscaling, self-healing, and proactive issue detection, we have saved thousands of support and engineering hours.

  • Sustainability commitments: By migrating workloads to energy-efficient Google Cloud C4A instances, Elastic reduced its compute-related carbon footprint by an estimated 25%, supporting our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals without compromising performance.

This transformation has made Elastic leaner, more scalable, and more customer-focused — demonstrating the long-term business value of cloud-native innovation.

Elastic — The Search AI Company

Elastic’s involvement in AI is driven by a clear, multipronged vision. 

  • We aim to empower enterprises by delivering production-ready search and platform capabilities to accelerate their adoption of generative AI (GenAI), enabling them to build intelligent, domain-specific AI applications with ease. 

  • We embrace AI to enhance our own solutions by integrating GenAI-powered operations across our security and observability offerings to help customers detect, investigate, and resolve issues faster. 

  • We adopted AI internally to boost productivity within our support and sales organizations, streamlining knowledge access, automating responses, and improving decision making.

elastic's search ai platform

These efforts reflect our belief in AI not only as a transformative technology for our customers but also a strategic enabler of efficiency, innovation, and smarter operations within Elastic.

Try it out!

The future of search, security, and observability is here without compromise on speed, scale, or cost. Experience Elastic Cloud Serverless and Search AI Lake to unlock new opportunities with your data. Learn more about the possibilities of serverless, or start your free trial now on Google Cloud.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.

In this blog post, we may have used or referred to third party generative AI tools, which are owned and operated by their respective owners. Elastic does not have any control over the third party tools and we have no responsibility or liability for their content, operation or use, nor for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of such tools. Please exercise caution when using AI tools with personal, sensitive or confidential information. Any data you submit may be used for AI training or other purposes. There is no guarantee that information you provide will be kept secure or confidential. You should familiarize yourself with the privacy practices and terms of use of any generative AI tools prior to use.

Elastic, Elasticsearch, and associated marks are trademarks, logos or registered trademarks of Elasticsearch N.V. in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names are trademarks, logos or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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