So I guess my comment is getting downvoted by people who don't understand «mission critical». >how can you run mission critical if most cloud services have SLA

So I guess my comment is getting downvoted by people who don't understand «mission critical». >how can you run mission critical if most cloud services have SLAs two or three nines weaker than needed That's exactly it. Cloud providers usually provide SLAs in the range of 95-99%. Amazon doesn't provide a full refund until monthly uptime goes below 95 %. Elastic apparently doesn't provide an uptime guarantee at all, they only provide an SLA for support ticket response times. And only on gold and platinum subscriptions. This incident lasted for more than 24 hours («most» instances restored after 22 hours). It doesn't matter if it's someone else that has to wake up at 3 am to fix the issue, when they're unable to fix it within reasonable time. Mission critical apps simply can't be down for 24 hours. And it's fully possible to design HA elasticsearch deployments. Elastic Cloud just isn't one of them.