I changed from AWS managed ElasticSearch to Elastic.co a couple of months ago. Should have done it sooner.
They would have competed on the merits of the product. Looks like whoever is making these decisions is not familiar with what made them popular with Devs in the first place.
But I don’t know how much of that is just ES and how much is Amazon
Last time we tried to upgrade our cluster version on AWS we ended up waiting for weeks until it randomly updated mid day on a busy day and broke everything.
It's a ton of small things that really make a difference.
T2 and T3s with no Master Nodes, let alone three, leads to a lot of problems.
When everything lives in MMAP'd memory and you are nickel and dime'n it with 4GB and one CPU. You're going to have a bad day.
The update was instant, what wasn't instant was the wait for the update. IDK if it was the maintenance window (which was set up for a weekend) or some bug, but we DID end up waiting weeks until it randomly updated.