Here’s the Deal

Elastic Cloud vs AWS Elasticsearch

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When comparing Elastic Cloud vs AWS Elasticsearch, the Slant community recommends Elastic Cloud for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted Elasticsearch services?” Elastic Cloud is ranked 1st while AWS Elasticsearch is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Elastic Cloud is:

Rather than pricing by number of documents or API calls, they price by instance size. So if you have a lot of documents (>100k) that are very small (50MB), or a large number of shards which are small, you won't be arbitrarily forced into a higher pricing tier. Same deal with number of requests - if you need more memory on your instance, then upgrade. If you have a lot of very fast requests, you can stay on a lower tier.

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Common Questions

What are the best hosted Elasticsearch services?

Pros

Pro
Scalable

Pro
All Elasticsearch features are supported

Pro
New versions are available same day as released

Pro
Extremely stable

This is the official version of hosted ElasticSearch and it's backed by the ElasticSearch developers. This makes it probably the best in terms of stability as far as services that use ElasticSearch as a backend go.

Pro
Comes with Shield (security), Watcher (alerting) and Marvel (monitoring)

Pro
Allow uploading custom plugins

Pro
Includes S3 bucket for snapshot and restore (Automatic Backup every 30 minutes)

Pro
Free trial available

There's a 14 days-long trial available without any credit card required.

Pro
Dedicated clusters with reserved memory and storage

Clusters aren't shared, customers get their own dedicated cluster. Memory and storage is reserved - there's no upper limit in terms of indexes or documents to be stored - and Linux containers are used (LXC) for and process and resource isolation, which means you get the memory you are paying for without having to compete for it with other customers.

Pro
Great support

Supported by the Elasticsearch developers themselves, although they won't respond for days.

Pro
Easy to work with

Elasticsearch gained its popularity amongst developers by being enjoyable to use. A simple feature comparison against it's competition doesn't convey the significant advantages of just how easy it is to work with. This is due to multiple design choices such as the use of JSON for the API and queries.

Pro
Allows multiple types of documents per index

Another useful and unique feature to Elasticsearch is the ability to have multiple types of documents in a single index. You can then facet, query or filter against all document types or a single type.

Pro
Supports cjk plugins

Pro
Integrates with multiple third-party services

Works marvelously with Tire and Heroku.

Pro
Includes x-pack

Xpack is plug-in for elastic search and Kibana. It provides features for securing and monitoring your elastic search instance.
https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack

Pro
Only small markup from raw instance costs

The mark up is only about 130% of the raw instance cost. This makes is one of the cheapest ES hosting options.

Pro
Easy to setup

Integrates nicely with AWS ecosystem. Basically One-click setup of ES clusters.

Pro
It is a part of your AWS bill

Very simple to add it if your organization is already charged from AWS.

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Cons

Con
Support not satisfactory

Although this is provided by the creators of elastic search, the support is not as effective. It seems they only want you to buy the Gold / Platinum package for support.

Even though you clearly give proof to the support personnel that there is something wrong with the provisioning of the cluster do not be surprised if you get a mail back saying "Everything looks fine...blah blah ...consider taking gold/platinum support...blah blah."