A difficult company to work with
The CloudFormation template seems to have a slight bug in it when you try to use it outside of us-east-1. That or there is an alternative bucket name beside the default I should be using. It was easy to work around in main stack, but the stack references templates for sub-stacks in an S3 bucket. I'm sure I could have grabbed the contents of the bucket, made my own bucket, made my own templates, and made it all work, but it bugged me to bill a client for time spent doing all of this to make a SaaS solution, which should save us time, work.
I've explained the issue to Elastic seven times in the last week. I even included snips of their problematic template, highlighted the offending lines, and suggested how they might fix the issue. But they won't help themselves or me. Instead, they seem terrified that I'm going to get free support out of them, and the free support has taken days to demonstrate that they don't know what I am saying. I still could have worked around this, but I fear it foreshadows what future interaction might be like if I did get cornered by an issue.
Two stars vs. one, because I've used the product under Docker Compose. Elastic Stack has issues, but it is generally an exciting and powerful product. I don't want to be stuck working with a company that acts this way and I believe that it is primarily the managed service they are offering that I am reviewing.
- Leave a Comment |
- 2 comments |
- Mark review as helpful
Feels like Alpha
We were very pleased discovering the option to procure ES Cloud through AWS Amrketplace. However, we quickly found very basic features missing:
- It is not possible to have more than one management account for ES Cloud. Meaning only one user can create and manage deployments (clusters)
- It is not possible to restrict IP ranges for access to ES endpoints
- A private VPC Link apparently requires manual steps on ES side and was not available for us.
Of Course Elasticsearch works and configuration is relatively easy. Due to the issues mentioned, I can't recommend this service for anything close to production.
Oh, the things I learned!
The Elastic Cloud service wasn't for us. We use Elasticsearch for storing and analyzing the logs for our various servers/services. We could only store a limited amount of logs (obviously), though much more limited than we would like - your cluster's provisioning are linked on memory and disk space, in order to get more storage you'll also need to bump up the memory. I found I was having to bump to the next tier when my memory usage wasn't even close to maxed out. The price of a production cluster quickly escalated to a point where the cost couldn't be justified. I think this is probably due to our use case - so, your experience my differ.
If you care about uptime, you'll also want(need) to pay for Gold or Platinum support. I liked the convenience of paying through the AWS marketplace - but, the impression I got was that Elastic would prefer you pay them directly.
They also, offer an X-Pack monitoring service, which seems useful, but I didn't use, so I can't comment on it. However, if you chose not to use that service, be prepared to roll your own monitoring solution - otherwise your only way to detect problems pro-actively is via the Elastic Cloud web page.
Perhaps I expected too much from this service, but seeing as it is a pricey option (compared to self hosting), I feel my expectations were justified.