Benefits and best practices for migrating workloads to Elastic Cloud on AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure

Migrating to Elastic Cloud gives organizations the chance to focus on core business priorities to accelerate results that matter — while maintenance and upkeep is managed for you.

Take advantage of the scalability and cost savings features of Elastic Cloud with simplified options for the migration of your Elastic self-managed workloads to the provider of your choice — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. Realize a faster time to value by leveraging the latest integrations so you can quickly capture, store, search, and analyze your data. Let’s review the benefits of Elastic Cloud, how to spin up your Elastic Cloud deployment, and determine your best migration path. 

Lower your TCO and save time while keeping your data secure

Reduce operational overhead, automatically scale your deployments, and easily update to the latest Elastic version and pay only for the resources you need — saving you both time and money. 

Cloud-native features like data tiers and data lifecycle management enable you to leverage inexpensive cloud-based object storage like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure Blob. With searchable snapshots you can keep the data you need, at any granularity while keeping costs down, then search and visualize your data whenever you need it. 

Rest assured, Elastic Cloud has built-in security best practices to help ensure customer data cannot be accessed through unauthorized means. In addition, Elastic Cloud is continuously audited and verified by independent third parties to help meet your data security, compliance, and privacy industry standards. 

Add value to your business

Create improved customer outcomes and operational efficiencies with a holistic view into your AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure environment. Serverless integrations make it easy for you to ingest your data from popular cloud services into Elastic and you can quickly gain actionable insights with prebuilt dashboards. Leverage use case specific workflows and custom visualizations so you can react swiftly to your ever-evolving business needs.

Deploy anywhere in minutes — across the world

Get up and running in minutes, globally, in any of the dozens of supported regions across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. You can choose from a single cloud region or deploy across multiple cloud providers to support your use cases.

Get started with an Elastic free trial

It’s simple. To sign up, go on the Elastic website and begin immediately with a free trial that requires no upfront commitments or credit card information. Even if you are already familiar with Elastic and are currently running on-premises workloads, this is a great place to evaluate all the benefits Elastic Cloud has to offer. Simply choose your cloud provider, ingest your data (or choose our sample data), and explore. 

Leverage an easy purchase path 

IT spend can be complicated to track and manage when it comes from many different sources. With Elastic Cloud, you will receive your usage charges within your cloud service bill, if you purchase directly through your cloud service provider’s marketplace. If you have an AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure spend commitment, purchasing directly from your respective marketplace allows for part of the Elastic Cloud fees to be drawn down against this existing spend commitment. Let’s go over key resources and the additional benefits of purchasing directly through the AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Marketplaces.

AWS Marketplace

It’s easy to get started directly from the AWS Marketplace. Begin with a 7-day free trial and take advantage of integrations like Amazon S3 Storage Lens, AWS FireLens, and AWS Serverless Application Repository to streamline data ingestion and quickly turn data into actionable insights. Elastic has achieved AWS ISV Workload Migration Program (WMP) partner status with a proven methodology to help you migrate self-managed on-premises Elastic workloads to Elastic Cloud on AWS. 

Google Cloud Marketplace

Deploy directly from the Google Cloud Marketplace and leverage the latest integrations that allow you to ship data to Elastic from BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, and Pub/Sub without installing additional software or configuring YAML files. Plus, the Elastic App Search extension for Google Cloud Firestore allows developers to offer premium search experiences on their mobile and web apps. 

Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Quickly deploy from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and easily ingest Azure platform, resource, and virtual machine logs with just a few clicks. You can also view and manage your Elasticsearch deployment within the Azure portal and use your Azure account for single sign-on into Elastic Cloud and your Kibana instances. See all the Elastic and Azure integrations, like Microsoft Azure Spring Cloud, that allow you to seamlessly ingest data then monitor your applications to increase operational efficiency and development activities.

Choose your migration path

If your data source (like applications, infrastructure) is also going to be migrated to AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure then you can re-ingest your data into Elastic Cloud from the data source. If your data needs to be migrated to Elastic Cloud, the best path will depend on several factors, including the specific use case, data volume, current Elasticsearch version, and uptime requirements on the current Elasticsearch application. Data can be migrated to an Elastic Cloud deployment through these two options:

• Snapshot and restore - Create a repository in Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Microsoft Azure Blob. Then create a snapshot of the current deployment into the repository, add the same repository from Elastic Cloud and restore indexes from the snapshot into Elastic Cloud. This option is ideal when data in existing clusters need to be moved to Elastic Cloud, and the existing cluster is running an earlier Elasticsearch version than Elastic Cloud.
• Reindex from a remote cluster - Use the Reindex API from the new cluster to retrieve data from the indices in the existing Elasticsearch cluster and reindex them in the new Elastic Cloud deployment. This is the best option when data volumes are low and/or there are constraints to using a snapshot and restore, and the existing cluster is running an earlier Elasticsearch version than Elastic Cloud.

The data migration paths are described in step-by-step detail in these AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure guides. You can also reach out to our Elastic Consulting team to help you migrate complex workloads to the cloud provider of your choice.

Start today with Elastic Cloud

Migrate to take advantage of the Elastic Cloud benefits, using the Elastic solutions your team already knows — to search, solve, and succeed at cloud scale. View this website and documentation for more information.

Contact us to find out more about how Elastic can provide assessment, planning, and financial assistance to help with your migration.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.