Hosted Elasticsearch Services Roundup: Elastic Cloud and Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Our Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud, which runs Elasticsearch and Kibana as a service, has become popular. But there's been some confusion. Elastic's Elasticsearch Service and the Amazon Elasticsearch Service are different offerings, and neither is the same as running vanilla Elasticsearch on AWS. 

To be very clear, the Amazon Elasticsearch Service is not related to Elastic. Elastic does not partner with, participate in, or support, the Amazon Elasticsearch Service.

Instead, we offer Elastic Cloud, our platform for hosted Elasticsearch, Kibana, and X-Pack service that runs on AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. We also support a variety of customers who self-manage their own clusters on AWS.

And, again, Elastic's Elasticsearch Service is not the same as the Amazon Elasticsearch Service. In fact, we believe our Elastic Cloud platform brings unique value to mission-critical applications, validating the importance of our offering. 

We'd like to explain why.

Features That Delight with the Projects You Love, Hosted

When we talk about the Elasticsearch Service built on Elastic Cloud, we often dive straight into the details about our open source products in the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. While they're fantastic, we'd like to start from a different angle: X-Pack.

X-Pack is an extension that bundles together security, alerting, monitoring, reporting, and graph exploration capabilities that extend what you can do with the Elastic Stack. Furthermore, Elastic's Elasticsearch Service is the only offering that ships with free features like Search Profiler and the Elastic Maps Service (with zoom levels you can dial up to 18).

Access to these features opens up brave new worlds and possibilities with Elasticsearch and Kibana. And X-Pack features, along with the open source products, get better and better with every release.

This is why we take pride in being able to offer the latest versions of Elasticsearch, Kibana, and X-Pack on Elasticsearch Service the day a release drops. When Elasticsearch 5.4 or 6.0 or 10.3 ships, you can count on the Elasticsearch Service having the option to upgrade to it at the same time. Similarly, if there is a security vulnerability, we patch user clusters as soon as the fix is released.  

Our ability to get you the latest and greatest the moment it's available is critical to your success. We also know there's more to it than that, whether you need to make a change to your elasticsearch.yml (specific settings are whitelisted in Elastic Cloud), click a single button to upgrade your cluster to the most recent version, restore from an automated snapshot that occurs every 30 minutes, scale your cluster by moving a slider, or, recently, file a ticket in the support portal provided all Elastic Cloud customers.

All of this matters because it makes good sense, but also because you've told us it matters. And we will always strive to honor that and listen to you.

There Is No Compression Algorithm for Experience

As an Elasticsearch Service user you are, in a way, benefiting from the wisdom of the relative ancients. Elastic Cloud has been around since 2012 (known as Found in its early life). Amazon's Elasticsearch Service was introduced in 2015.

Operational excellence is not something to take lightly or undervalue. There is a lot of work that goes into ensuring that the lights stay on and customers are getting a high level of service. There is no compression algorithm for experience. (Amazon, of course, has been offering services via AWS since 2006. In the context of managing and supporting hosted Elasticsearch, however, our team has a few years head start.)

The Elastic Cloud is a mature platform. It supports customers like IBM, Fandango, Activision Blizzard, Unilever, Shopify, and more. They put their trust in us to keep their mission-critical systems firing on all cylinders.

To make sure that we are providing the uptime our Elastic Cloud premium customers require, we now provide an SLA for Elastic Cloud. And, we do so by measuring cluster-level availability instead of infrastructure-level availability.

We Eat, Sleep, and Breathe the Elastic Stack

The team that builds the Elastic Stack works alongside the team that builds and runs Elastic Cloud. No one, and we mean no one, understands the nature of issues like the Elastic team. We strive for a bug-free, problem-free experience. But it is software and things do, indeed, happen. Support from the source can make the difference between a pleasant day with a resolved interruption and one that is downright unpleasant.

Amazing Performance, Very Little Cost

As of today, Elastic Cloud uses only I-series instances on AWS (currently I2). As such, even the smallest cluster in Elastic Cloud runs on best-in-class AWS instances. Given a production need for I/O, network, and CPU guarantees, T-series instances aren't terribly applicable. And, of course, I3 instances are coming soon.

That said, simple price comparison is a race to the bottom. The Amazon Elasticsearch Service is cheaper in some circumstances. In an apples-to-apples comparison (i2 instances with similar memory to disk ratios, retention periods that match, matching deployment across AZs, and ignoring support and commercial products), the Amazon Elasticsearch Service is actually ~20% more expensive. Learn how much your deployment will cost on the Elasticsearch Service with our interactive pricing calculator.

As you can see, Elastic's Elasticsearch Service is price competitive and you also get the benefit of current releases, security patches, and X-Pack.

"But wait," you may say. "Amazon already has my credit card number." Or sometimes, "I have to use my Amazon credentials for payment."

We've got you covered.  Now you can pick between having your bill come through Elastic or AWS via the hosted Elasticsearch service on the AWS Marketplace!

Running Elasticsearch on AWS

We have the perfect post for you if you're interested in running and managing your own instances of Elasticsearch on AWS.

The Details Matter

"I get it," you say, "Elastic knows their products better than anyone else. But what about the details?" They are below and we will keep the table current as things change.

The beauty of modern software is that there is flexibility in deployment and consumption models. If you desire a cloud deployment, make sure you understand what you are getting and from whom. As the creators of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, we want you to have the best possible experience with the Elastic Stack. That's why we created and stand behind only one hosted offering — Elastic's Elasticsearch Service on the Elastic Cloud.

Last updated on November 14, 2018.

If you haven't already, we invite you to take a 14-day trial of the Elasticsearch Service (no credit card required). Enjoy.

Editor’s Note (September 3, 2019): This blog has been updated to include Microsoft Azure as a cloud provider for Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud. For more information, please read the announcement blog.