While I don't entirely disagree I think it should be made clear that both can be true, even at the same time. To spin up a 9 node managed Elasticsearch cluster

While I don't entirely disagree I think it should be made clear that both can be true, even at the same time. To spin up a 9 node managed Elasticsearch cluster load-balanced across two regions takes a competent engineer with practice roughly a couple of hours, or twenty to thirty minutes if they were smart and terraformed it out previously. Now there's a whole host of potential problems that come along with using that managed Elasticsearch cluster too (no access to "cluster mode", no tunability, etc). But if those potential problems don't apply to you and a very vanilla ES cluster suits your use case then you're fine. Alternatively that practiced engineer could have spun up a self-managed ES cluster in a couple of DCs in about the same time, but now has the obligation to maintain those servers (patching, etc.). Maybe that marginal cost is damn near zero - chef has been deployed to all instances and enforces patching and there's already good security monitoring in place, etc. The cost of that engineer managing that box, as with a managed ES in AWS, is practically nothing. TL;DR: as in all cases, it depends.