For what it's worth, if you want to run ElasticSearch on AWS I would always go with local-NVMe instances from the i3 family, this is also what AWS and Elasticse

For what it's worth, if you want to run ElasticSearch on AWS I would always go with local-NVMe instances from the i3 family, this is also what AWS and Elasticsearch themselves recommend. 4x i3en.2xlarge (64GB / 5TB NVMe) at $449 / month (1yr reserved) is $1796, or $2636 without reservation, but much better performance due to the NVMe drives.