Elastic Cloud was always behind what AWS already offerred. Not sure how it is like today, but it was one of blockers for us. And what AWS offers today is not a

Elastic Cloud was always behind what AWS already offerred. Not sure how it is like today, but it was one of blockers for us. And what AWS offers today is not a huge bar, mainly too many reliability problems, at the 1.5x of bare EC2 cost, a stupid load balancer in front of cluster that abstracts the nodes so you cannot connect to the healthy one yourself and probably load balancer is too late to mark it unhealthy, many hours of blue-green deployment that increases latency considerably, overly complex Cognito for auth.. list continues. Still after all these years, like most half-managed offerings in AWS, ES offering sucks IMO. Elastic happily used the free software Lucene, community contribution when it was convenient for more than 8 years, but when they surely lagged behind what AWS offers, they switched to this licence. ES cloud was not reasonable price either. Why it's not fair? The license explicitly allows that. From another point of view, years of contribution is now behind another non-free license and outside contributors would not want to contribute to it. Hating on AWS sounds cool in HN, but there are many projects starting AGPL now, however Amazon ES has been launched in 2015, there was plenty of time to make the license switch but they did not. They tried licensing parts of it, which made sense (I guess after the IPO, not sure.) but when AWS just implemented those on their own they went this license route and alienated everyone. Finally, there is not just AWS ES, there were always another ones to offer managed ELK, i.o Logz.io and others who are also supportive of this fork now. Why there were so many providers? Because ES did not provide, and when they acquired another company to provide it, it was not on-par with others, so the situation today.