Much of that isn't specific to Elasticsearch; security, backups, logging config, etc is all going to be extremely common across just about every similar product

Much of that isn't specific to Elasticsearch; security, backups, logging config, etc is all going to be extremely common across just about every similar product. I didn't say that Elasticsearch was "trivial", I said that it's one of the easiest clustered DBs to administrate. Anything distributed has a whole set of caveats that you have to be aware of and know how to handle, but using managed ES vs hosting your own doesn't really change any of that. My point is that the value-add from AWS' managed ES product is much, much smaller than it might be for other similar products because of the relative ease of administrating ES.