Several years ago, I led a project at a startup to move from Postgres to Elasticsearch for geographic search. I chose Elasticsearch because it had the capabilit

Several years ago, I led a project at a startup to move from Postgres to Elasticsearch for geographic search. I chose Elasticsearch because it had the capability to do geohashing and so it provided a credible alternative to PostGIS for our particular use case. Geohashing-based search is particularly computationally intensive, which is somewhat different from traditional full-text search, which can be memory intensive. I wanted to pay Elasticsearch to host our search cluster. And I did for a while. But it became clear we were paying for gobs of RAM that we weren't using and we didn't have enough CPU to really cover our search needs. I talked to the head of sales at the time and he said they were working on a plan that would allow us to choose machines that were more CPU heavy but that that was in the pipeline and there was no ETA. So we switched to AWS and everything worked just fine. All this is to say, Amazon was not offering the exact same service. They were offering a better service.