Elasticsearch is an open-source, distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It allows storing, searching, and analyzing large volumes of data quickly and in near real-time. Key concepts include being schema-free, document-oriented, and distributed. Indices can be created to store different types of documents. Mapping defines how documents are indexed. Documents can be added, retrieved, updated, and deleted via RESTful APIs. Queries can be used to search for documents matching search criteria. Faceted search provides aggregated data based on search queries. Elastica provides a PHP client for interacting with Elasticsearch.