Heh, I'm pretty sure our attempt to use AWS-managed ES went badly, and we quickly gave up on it and stuck with self-hosted. And this is at a company that's pretty keen to use AWS-managed services when we can.
https://spun.io/2019/10/10/aws-elasticsearch-a-fundamentally...
https://code972.com/blog/2017/12/why-you-shouldnt-use-aws-el...
Make darn well sure you aren't using any unsupported operations.
In their favor, if I were to revisit them I could use it now; however in the past they didn't support templates and a few other things which turned out to be major blockers.
More details here - https://www.akshaysurve.com/2018/01/what-we-like-about-amazo...
If you want to get it set up and running most of the way without tuning a bunch of stuff it’s pretty good.
It also has significant cost overhead compared to self-managed and limited instance types.
My team now is working on migrating a 2.3 cluster from AWS ES to a 7.8 self-managed cluster (probably 7.9 now I guess). We do lots of indexing throughout the day and the i3 instances available are pretty weak, just switching to r5d/r6gd instances greatly reduced our indexing and search latency
But reading these comments I get wary of doing it that way.
AWS Elasticsearch may not be for power users but they did announce Petabyte and Ultrawarm for über scale clusters in run up to last year's re:Invent: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/dev... and https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/run-a-petabyte-scale-c...