Hacker News Reader

Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

As a longtime ElasticSearch cluster admin/developer and Elastic Cloud customer, I don't feel bad for Elastic in the slightest and I'm psyched about this fork.

The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend if you end up wanting to use it for anything demanding in production.

View on HN

Not to mention the support is pretty slow to respond and rarely respond adequately.

At my current client we started with their cloud and in a few months deployed our own in Kubernetes using the official operator.

It's a lot cheaper and gives us fewer headaches this way.

My favorite moment as a customer dealing with all of the random times _they_ would take us down (even with triple redundancy) was their suggestion of operating a duplicate 3 datacenter cluster in production as a hot spare.

They must think their customers are cash machines.

I mean if they were truely best of breed they wouldn’t have needed a license change now would they?

Indeed, although I'd say for a majority of situations, Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch service is a complete non-starter.

Why is it a non-starter? I have a few ElasticSearch clusters that have been running for years with zero effort/downtime/hassle.

It's pretty bad when you reach the 40-50 node scale with 10's or 100's of TB of data. I've had about half dozen calls with their service team about this over the last year.

What the other guy said.

Also my saying that is extremely colored by experiences with pre-ES6 versions, where AWS's offering didn't have many of the configuration knobs available that you really _need_ to operate a decent cluster.

Personal experience is that AWS elasticsearch has often been missing some really useful stuff, index rebalancing, some of the utility endpoints that avoid me having to spend forever rebuilding indexes, etc. I'd be a little spooked to run something really huge and customer-facing (maybe it's possible and I'm a n00b, but for the money we pay, it should be n00b friendly).

It's always great (really, it was quite easy to get started and usually works) until it's not (a couple times have had indexes break, or had to reindex to a fresh cluster to fix balancing problems).

I'm sure LOTS of people use aws elasticsearch for big, user-facing stuff, but I often feel you'd be better off managing it yourself if it were truly critical.

This was my experience too: the AWS ES hosted offering was ok, but we had an outage and some associated needs and we basically lost all of our data.

However, we found that running our own cluster on EC2 with Cloudformation was relatively painless.

This is really a shame to hear. There was once a an Elastic SaaS company from Norway called found.io that were pretty sharp and customer-centric. They were acquired be Elastic pretty early on[1]. I believe Elastic Cloud was built from this. I guess found.io's culture of delivering a good product didn't survive?

https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-acquires-elastics...

Honestly the amount of negativity towards Elastic in this thread is jarring. I’ve been an ES customer (self hosted, some cloud) for years and have only good things to say about them. Maybe I’m less a fan of the number of features they try to bake in and the direction of the company towards using logs for metrics (which causes heavy disk load instead of just storing metrics in time series) but. Yeah.

I truly believe the negative voices are coming to the fore in this thread or they are paid Amazon folks (or they have a vested interest in AWS succeeding here).

Are you even a customer if you don't pay Elastic any money ? Your a user, sure, but not a customer.

These other opinions and negative voices you reference come from actual customers who pay Elastic large sums of money, and they feel they don't get good value and service for that money they're forking over.

You cannot use the cloud systems without paying; how on earth do you figure I’m not a customer from what I wrote?

Because you said you're "self hosted" on 'some cloud'. You don't need to pay Elastic if you're self-hosted and not using the Elastic Cloud - you can just download it and use it for free.

They could be paying Elastic for gold/plat/etc licenses on their self hosted instances or “self hosted, some cloud” could mean they run mostly self hosted with some Elastic cloud usage.

So everyone who doesn't share your experience is a paid actor? Not on throwaway accounts?

No, I said “either these negative opinions are coming to the fore”- as in, I haven’t heard them before and they’re suddenly quite loud- which is entirely possible as people do not have a place to vent I guess.

Or people who have some form of vested interest in AWS succeeding (whether directly financial or indirectly benefiting from AWS being a monopoly) are influencing the discussion.

I was mostly thinking that in previous threads on this same subject these voices were not quite so loud.

Perhaps telling that none of the Found team are still at Elastic, from what I can tell on LinkedIn. I pay attention to that kind of stuff because (full disclosure) I operate the _other_ small customer-focused managed Elasticsearch company (bonsai.io) that _didn't_ get acquired by Elastic back in 2015.

There's also logz.io, but that's targeted at a specific customer.

Also virtual beers to you -- I really like Websolr!

FYI your pricing has this 'HIPAA Complicance'.

> The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend

Pretty sure this is the definition of SAAS and IAAS

They all give you levers. I'm more referring to being required to overspend to overcome Elastic's incompetence (i.e., you're already aware of the levers, they're maxed out and the provider doesn't have a way forward).

Referring to my other example, in more detail: Elastic Cloud suggests operating your cluster across 3 datacenters for redundancy. This is a good idea. Then Elastic does maintenance in all three datacenters that your infrastructure is in at once and takes your clusters hard down. This is fucking stupid. Elastic's suggested solution to the problem: Operate a _duplicate_ cluster in 3 datacenters in a different region/provider. No guarantees that they won't do the same there either so it's not actually a solution.

This! The company I work for spending over $750,000 with Elastic Cloud every year and the quality of service we get from them leave a lot of be desired. I don't feel bad for Elasticsearch corp, they have done this to them selfs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com