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Comment by busterarm

4 years ago

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.

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.

  • 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.

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-elastics...

  • Perhaps telling that none of the Found team are still at Elastic, from what I can tell on LinkedIn. I pay attention to that kind of stuff because (full disclosure) I operate the _other_ small customer-focused managed Elasticsearch company (bonsai.io) that _didn't_ get acquired by Elastic back in 2015.

  • 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).

    • 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.

      3 replies →

> 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

  • 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.

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.