It's actually fairly difficult. There are so many different possible combinations of incoming data quality, quantity, system and disk configuration, performance

It's actually fairly difficult. There are so many different possible combinations of incoming data quality, quantity, system and disk configuration, performance and internal ES settings. Only an administrator would be familiar enough with the environment to monitor and tweak the configuration to make it the most performant. There are a few hosted elasticsearch services available (Elastic Cloud, AWS ES, Qbox, etc) which would likely be a better option for the team that needed a hands-off elasticsearch cluster.