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Comment by andrewvc | Hacker News Reader

As the author mentions AWS Elasticsearch does lag behind in versions. They still only support 1.5.2[1] which is over a year old at this point and is missing a lot of performance optimizations and operational improvements.

Elastic (the company behind Elasticsearch) provides an AWS based SaaS Elasticsearch product https://www.elastic.co/cloud/as-a-service with a very sane version policy[2] that keeps pace with the latest Elasticsearch releases.

Disclaimer, I work for Elastic

1. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/faqs/

2. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/version-policy...

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We've looked into using Elastic hosted Elasticsearch ourselves but what really put us off is that even if your whole cluster fails the only support method you get is a forum. You have to purchase a support package for the whole of Elasticsearch at some unspecified price just to get proper support for the hosted service itself. We don't want support for using Elasticsearch just for the hosted service we're paying for.

the "unspecified" price is a lot. I think they reworked their pricing structure sometime around ElastiCon this year, but prior to that a subscription (which includes support, and all their products; only way they sold stuff then) was ~$5k /server/year.

I think it may be cheaper now though.

Last I checked a month or so ago it was still around 5-7k per node so that sounds accurate

Got a price slightly above that in EUR. A cluster of 1 to 5 nodes should go for ~24.000€ (customer would've been SMB non-IT enduser company). My gut reaction was: Insane. They do include infrastructure consulting, support and the premium plugins as part of that. So at least if you can grab lots of consulting that way I can see where they are going. Then again, needing lots of consulting is a problem in itself. And I guess operating Elasticsearch is not for the faint of heart anyway...

everyone wants competent 24/7 support, but nobody wants to pay for it.

smart people cost a lot of money, having them on call at any time of the day or night costs even more money.

Agreed, however, their model should include a base level of direct support for straightforward things. Like "my cluster is unresponsive" right now thats a forum post and seems a really poor experience.

"my cluster is unresponsive" is not straightforward at all. in fact it's the vaguest, most un-straightforward kind of problem you could have.

one of the interview questions i ask is "a customer calls in and said their system is unresponsive. what do you do?"

this will weed out a bullshitter 99% of the time, because the potential problem domain is the entire OSI stack, across the open internet, and also could be potentially on the customer side, which is most likely also a complex setup.

if you want someone who can actually fix the problem to help you, it's going to cost a lot of money. one of these people is six figures. now imagine a whole team of them, 3 shifts a day, every single day, forever.

You miss my point, I simply mean a forum post is not ideal for support. In my case I would want a ticket, something concrete I know can be sent and seen. A forum does not engender confidence my issue will be seen and also I would not want to put private info into a forum.

Also I gave a poor example. I run a Es cluster so my thinking is at the point of my cluster is unavailable i know it's all red and it's not between my service and the endpoint.

anything free or included will be abused by a certain % of the customer base.

if you feel that strongly about it, buy the support.

I got a similar quote about a year ago. They now have a "startup" price which is lower [under nda]. Still too costly with regards to our usage/level of confidence in our own expertise but they are adjusting their pricing.

I have not priced Elastic or AWS offerings but wonder how that would compare to AWS.

Our company had a horrible experience with Elastic Cloud:

1. We were provisioned hardware that was less performant than promised (HDD rather than SSD-backed.)

2. The dashboard suggests significantly lower memory utilization than reality. We spent days going down the wrong rabbit holes, when we were getting timeouts simply related to out of memory errors.

3. When there's a shard failure, your only option is to reach out to support. You can't upgrade the database or anything.

We switched to Bonsai and it's been much more stable.

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