But I can't help but think Amazon can and would easily fix those things if they mattered. Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch is a lot cheaper than Elastic's, and I'll bet that's enough to get people to use it.
By poor performance, I assume you mean IO? AWS Elasticsearch has supported i3 instance type (nvme on-instance storage) for well over a year now [0]. Additionally, you could enable slow-logs to catch perf issues yourself [1]
> very slow to make cluster changes
Scale-out and access-policy changes happen in-place now and so happen much faster than they used to be.
> launch new clusters
In my experience, it depends on the cluster size, but usually, I see cluster being up in 20m. That's nice given that it sets up pretty much everything (spin up instances, apply access policies, run health checks, enable cloudwatch monitoring, snapshots, create route53 records, integrate with cognito, enc-at-rest via KMS, spin up load balancers, setup vpc resources etc) on my behalf.
[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/dev...
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/analyzing-amazon-elast...
I can also launch an Elasticsearch cluster myself in about 2 minutes via terraform, so 20 minutes is not super impressive.
That said I recognize Elasticsearch is actually quite a finicky beast to set up, and my setup only has to deal with the needs I have, and probably would be set up horribly for certain other people. I can see how a hosted system that has to deal with all the weird edge-cases of a few thousand customers would take longer to set things up.