If you use or evaluate Elastic Search, you may be surprised of the quite fast version lifecycle and the new features found in every minor version (almost a minor version each two months). Recently, Elastic Search 7.6 was released.
A simpler possibility than to upgrade your test environment, or test it in the Elastic cloud, is to use docker images for testing the new Elastic stuff. The documentation provides a docker-compose configuration for setting up a simple cluster, which it is indeed a good starting point to learn the basic settings. Even you can use these images in a Portainer infrastructure (or similar) for managing a Docker Swarm cluster of Docker Images.
Other docker possibility is to use this github project:
In this moment, this project is based on Elastic 7.5.1, so you can test some interesting features such as Kibana Lens. By default, in this setup, security and monitoring x-packs are enabled (user:elastic pass:changeme), and it activates by default a trial version of the license, so you can check some entrerprise features not included in open source / basic license.
Backing to official docker resources, if you are interested in App Search, you can use the following docker-compose for testing analytics, promoted documents, or relevance tunning for a general text-search use case.
Similar docker resources are provided for other use cases of observability, for example, if you are interested in APM you can check the following link
