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As a longtime ElasticSearch cluster admin/developer and Elastic Cloud customer, I don't feel bad for Elastic in the slightest and I'm psyched about this fork.

As a longtime ElasticSearch cluster admin/developer and Elastic Cloud customer, I don't feel bad for Elastic in the slightest and I'm psyched about this fork. The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend if you end up wanting to use it for anything demanding in production.

cassianoleal 6y ago
Not to mention the support is pretty slow to respond and rarely respond adequately. At my current client we started with their cloud and in a few months deployed our own in Kubernetes using the official operator. It's a lot cheaper and gives us fewer headaches this way.
- busterarm 6y ago
  My favorite moment as a customer dealing with all of the random times _they_ would take us down (even with triple redundancy) was their suggestion of operating a duplicate 3 datacenter cluster in production as a hot spare. They must think their customers are cash machines.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    I mean if they were truely best of breed they wouldn’t have needed a license change now would they?
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Indeed, although I'd say for a majority of situations, Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch service is a complete non-starter.
      - damon_c 6y ago
        Why is it a non-starter? I have a few ElasticSearch clusters that have been running for years with zero effort/downtime/hassle.
        x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
        It's pretty bad when you reach the 40-50 node scale with 10's or 100's of TB of data. I've had about half dozen calls with their service team about this over the last year.
        busterarm 6y ago
        What the other guy said. Also my saying that is extremely colored by experiences with pre-ES6 versions, where AWS's offering didn't have many of the configuration knobs available that you really _need_ to operate a decent cluster.
        hospadar 6y ago
        Personal experience is that AWS elasticsearch has often been missing some really useful stuff, index rebalancing, some of the utility endpoints that avoid me having to spend forever rebuilding indexes, etc. I'd be a little spooked to run something really huge and customer-facing (maybe it's possible and I'm a n00b, but for the money we pay, it should be n00b friendly). It's always great (really, it was quite easy to get started and usually works) until it's not (a couple times have had indexes break, or had to reindex to a fresh cluster to fix balancing problems). I'm sure LOTS of people use aws elasticsearch for big, user-facing stuff, but I often feel you'd be better off managing it yourself if it were truly critical.
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        This was my experience too: the AWS ES hosted offering was ok, but we had an outage and some associated needs and we basically lost all of our data. However, we found that running our own cluster on EC2 with Cloudformation was relatively painless.
ProAm 6y ago
> The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend Pretty sure this is the definition of SAAS and IAAS
- busterarm 6y ago
  They all give you levers. I'm more referring to being required to overspend to overcome Elastic's incompetence (i.e., you're already aware of the levers, they're maxed out and the provider doesn't have a way forward). Referring to my other example, in more detail: Elastic Cloud suggests operating your cluster across 3 datacenters for redundancy. This is a good idea. Then Elastic does maintenance in all three datacenters that your infrastructure is in at once and takes your clusters hard down. This is fucking stupid. Elastic's suggested solution to the problem: Operate a _duplicate_ cluster in 3 datacenters in a different region/provider. No guarantees that they won't do the same there either so it's not actually a solution.
bogomipz 6y ago
This is really a shame to hear. There was once a an Elastic SaaS company from Norway called found.io that were pretty sharp and customer-centric. They were acquired be Elastic pretty early on[1]. I believe Elastic Cloud was built from this. I guess found.io's culture of delivering a good product didn't survive? https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-acquires-elasticsearch-saas-provider-found https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-acquires-elastics...
- dijit 6y ago
  Honestly the amount of negativity towards Elastic in this thread is jarring. I’ve been an ES customer (self hosted, some cloud) for years and have only good things to say about them. Maybe I’m less a fan of the number of features they try to bake in and the direction of the company towards using logs for metrics (which causes heavy disk load instead of just storing metrics in time series) but. Yeah. I truly believe the negative voices are coming to the fore in this thread or they are paid Amazon folks (or they have a vested interest in AWS succeeding here).
  - bigtones 6y ago
    Are you even a customer if you don't pay Elastic any money ? Your a user, sure, but not a customer. These other opinions and negative voices you reference come from actual customers who pay Elastic large sums of money, and they feel they don't get good value and service for that money they're forking over.
    - dijit 6y ago
      You cannot use the cloud systems without paying; how on earth do you figure I’m not a customer from what I wrote?
      - bigtones 6y ago
        Because you said you're "self hosted" on 'some cloud'. You don't need to pay Elastic if you're self-hosted and not using the Elastic Cloud - you can just download it and use it for free.
knodi 6y ago
This! The company I work for spending over $750,000 with Elastic Cloud every year and the quality of service we get from them leave a lot of be desired. I don't feel bad for Elasticsearch corp, they have done this to them selfs.

cassianoleal 6y ago

Not to mention the support is pretty slow to respond and rarely respond adequately. At my current client we started with their cloud and in a few months deployed our own in Kubernetes using the official operator. It's a lot cheaper and gives us fewer headaches this way.

busterarm 6y ago
My favorite moment as a customer dealing with all of the random times _they_ would take us down (even with triple redundancy) was their suggestion of operating a duplicate 3 datacenter cluster in production as a hot spare. They must think their customers are cash machines.
- bombcar 6y ago
  I mean if they were truely best of breed they wouldn’t have needed a license change now would they?
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Indeed, although I'd say for a majority of situations, Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch service is a complete non-starter.
    - damon_c 6y ago
      Why is it a non-starter? I have a few ElasticSearch clusters that have been running for years with zero effort/downtime/hassle.
      - x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
        It's pretty bad when you reach the 40-50 node scale with 10's or 100's of TB of data. I've had about half dozen calls with their service team about this over the last year.
      - busterarm 6y ago
        What the other guy said. Also my saying that is extremely colored by experiences with pre-ES6 versions, where AWS's offering didn't have many of the configuration knobs available that you really _need_ to operate a decent cluster.
      - hospadar 6y ago
        Personal experience is that AWS elasticsearch has often been missing some really useful stuff, index rebalancing, some of the utility endpoints that avoid me having to spend forever rebuilding indexes, etc. I'd be a little spooked to run something really huge and customer-facing (maybe it's possible and I'm a n00b, but for the money we pay, it should be n00b friendly). It's always great (really, it was quite easy to get started and usually works) until it's not (a couple times have had indexes break, or had to reindex to a fresh cluster to fix balancing problems). I'm sure LOTS of people use aws elasticsearch for big, user-facing stuff, but I often feel you'd be better off managing it yourself if it were truly critical.
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        This was my experience too: the AWS ES hosted offering was ok, but we had an outage and some associated needs and we basically lost all of our data. However, we found that running our own cluster on EC2 with Cloudformation was relatively painless.

ProAm 6y ago

> The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend Pretty sure this is the definition of SAAS and IAAS

busterarm 6y ago
They all give you levers. I'm more referring to being required to overspend to overcome Elastic's incompetence (i.e., you're already aware of the levers, they're maxed out and the provider doesn't have a way forward). Referring to my other example, in more detail: Elastic Cloud suggests operating your cluster across 3 datacenters for redundancy. This is a good idea. Then Elastic does maintenance in all three datacenters that your infrastructure is in at once and takes your clusters hard down. This is fucking stupid. Elastic's suggested solution to the problem: Operate a _duplicate_ cluster in 3 datacenters in a different region/provider. No guarantees that they won't do the same there either so it's not actually a solution.

bogomipz 6y ago

This is really a shame to hear. There was once a an Elastic SaaS company from Norway called found.io that were pretty sharp and customer-centric. They were acquired be Elastic pretty early on[1]. I believe Elastic Cloud was built from this. I guess found.io's culture of delivering a good product didn't survive? https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-acquires-elasticsearch-saas-provider-found https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-acquires-elastics...

dijit 6y ago
Honestly the amount of negativity towards Elastic in this thread is jarring. I’ve been an ES customer (self hosted, some cloud) for years and have only good things to say about them. Maybe I’m less a fan of the number of features they try to bake in and the direction of the company towards using logs for metrics (which causes heavy disk load instead of just storing metrics in time series) but. Yeah. I truly believe the negative voices are coming to the fore in this thread or they are paid Amazon folks (or they have a vested interest in AWS succeeding here).
- bigtones 6y ago
  Are you even a customer if you don't pay Elastic any money ? Your a user, sure, but not a customer. These other opinions and negative voices you reference come from actual customers who pay Elastic large sums of money, and they feel they don't get good value and service for that money they're forking over.
  - dijit 6y ago
    You cannot use the cloud systems without paying; how on earth do you figure I’m not a customer from what I wrote?
    - bigtones 6y ago
      Because you said you're "self hosted" on 'some cloud'. You don't need to pay Elastic if you're self-hosted and not using the Elastic Cloud - you can just download it and use it for free.

knodi 6y ago

This! The company I work for spending over $750,000 with Elastic Cloud every year and the quality of service we get from them leave a lot of be desired. I don't feel bad for Elasticsearch corp, they have done this to them selfs.