Managed Elasticsearch – What does Elastic provide?
In this blog we will be covering what Elastic’s managed service covers, and what is not included. If you’re wondering whether to run self-hosted or look for a different solution, you can read about different hosting considerations in this blog.
What does Elastic cover?
Elastic ECK (for self-managed) and Elastic Cloud (the managed service) offer a convenient way to manage your Elasticsearch infrastructure. In addition, you get access to features on top of the managed service that can be used for specific use cases.
Elastic Cloud and ECK cover the infrastructure, orchestration and platform & networking aspects of deployments. Everything else is up to the customer: running operations, managing data and configuring security controls. Each company needs to make their own decisions regarding configuration and ascertain that their deployment can successfully meet their business needs.
This breakdown of responsibilities is available on their website.
Expectations VS. Reality of managing Elasticsearch
Users often start out self-managed before moving to managed services like Elastic Cloud.
Managed services, and in this case specifically Elastic, do not take care of the application layer. The application layer includes: taking care of ingesting data, configuring and maintaining data structure, optimizing shards, avoiding latency, preventing incidents, improving performance and more.
Managed services take no responsibility for the way you configure your data, as it would be out of scope for a managed service to be responsible for the data you want to put in your system. Their agenda is not to intervene with the way you decide to structure, configure and manage your data.
Elastic’s support can be helpful, especially if you have platinum support, as they will try to help with other sections from the application layer. However, this type of support is limited, meaning they will help you in a crisis when something isn’t working properly (they do not actively intervene to optimize and improve performance).
You can also buy consulting packages that can be very helpful, but they are on an ad-hoc basis and prices vary.
Expectations VS. Reality when running self-hosted:
Then again, users often have unrealistic expectations of what they’ll get from managed services as well.
What does Opster offer?
Opster’s products and support services cover both the infrastructure layer and the data layer of managing Elasticsearch & OpenSearch, with a focus on the data layer that users have always been left alone to handle. Opster can be used either alone, while running self-hosted, or in addition to a managed service like Elastic Cloud to cover the gaps in service and optimize performance.
- Automatic incident resolution and prevention.
- Support powered by the AutoOps platform.
- Optimized and improved performance.
- Resource utilization and reduction of infrastructure costs.
Opster AutoOps detects issues, provides automatic resolution paths and optimizes resource utilization. The technology and tools perform automatic optimizations with the AutoOps operator, an on-prem service, which also enables Opster’s support team to interact with the system in real time.
Here’s a quick video tour of AutoOps events and the issues you can solve in Elasticsearch using the platform. To try AutoOps for free, click here.
Summary
Elastic support might be a good fit for you as a standalone service to run your search operation, especially if your deployment is not mission-critical. However, if that’s not the case, you’ll likely find that the “shared responsibility” that falls on you takes a heavy toll on your team’s time and abilities.
No matter how you’re hosting your Elasticsearch, you can benefit from Opster’s complete solutions. With an Opster AutoOps subscription, your database administration will be taken care of from start to finish. You’ll benefit from complete resolution of issues in your infrastructure & data layers, end-to-end support and constant optimization of your clusters. To learn more about Opster AutoOps and try it for free, click here.
