Arbitrary Pricing
I have used Elastic a lot in the past and I really like it. This product was exactly what I was expecting and it worked well. What I didn't like was the $520 bill I got.
I was in disbelief. I messaged them that there must have been an error and I was told it was not. I contacted both Amazon and Elastic. Amazon says that if Elastic gives me a refund, it will be removed from my bill. Elastic says that they cannot remove the charge because it was "self inflicted."
I do not know what I did to incur this large of a bill. You can really spend a lot of money on this extension in only a few clicks and without being aware that you are doing so.
I started a free trial, then I used the service for a few days, making <25 requests to Elastic in entirety. Overall, I think that the content of the billing pages and the UX of the Elastic Suite is aimed to mislead its users which I find to be unfortunate.
For instance, their billing page (https://www.elastic.co/pricing) says that Enterprise Search can be as low as $175 per month. I do not see how that could possibly be the case because I only had a test index with 4-5 documents in it and made <25 requests to the index in total and racked up a $520 bill.
I am almost certain there is a legal case to be had here if I cared enough and had the time to pursue one.
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Template Doesn't work
The Template provided by them isn't working at all. The "S3 error: Access Denied" is denying CopyZipsTemplate from creation. I have been trying to deal with it for hours but there is no solution for this issue.
Mistake CF Template
As writing in other review, this product do not work properly.
First: you are forced to create an account (thanks, now I've 3 Elastic Cloud account, and you can't delete it)
Second: CloudFormation Launch Template do not work properly (multiple reason)
I spent 1 hour to try debugging yaml Launch Template (first time for me) and I waste my time.
As a result, I will buy a EC2 instance and run myself ES on docker...
Waste of time & money - don't try this. Read other comments & find another way to run ES
PS: 1 star because I couldn't put 0 star
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.
Billing and "Trial" version
I wanted to check this product - choosing the trial version was a huge mistake. As now Elastic trying to take my money, despite the fact that I never used the product. At all. And no communication from the support or any billing support at all.
Why am I getting charged for the service I have never been able to use?
Great work
Hi, we have tried Elastic Cloud and feel very satisfied with it. I would like to inquire about.
Is there an internal channel to directly access our ec2 or k8s cluster on aws？
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.
Terminated deployment but still getting billed. No help from support.
We decided to try this service because we were looking for alternative to AWS Elasticsearch service. Setting up was easy but then we quickly realised that there was no way to host the service in our own VPC (which you can do with AWS Elasticsearch) so we terminated the deployment after just a half of day use and went on deploying latest ElasticSearch setup right on vanilla EC2 instance in our VPC which also pretty straightforward and appears to be the most flexible solution.
However to our surprise a few days later checking our AWS bill we noticed that despite the fact that our test deployment has been terminated days ago we were still being billed by Elasticsearch Inc as if it was still running.
We contacted their support but received no response to date. And we still getting billed. There is no deployment in our list so nothing we can do on our end.
Very frustrating and very unprofessional from Elasticsearch Inc.
Great
The set up is really straightforward and all the operational tasks. The big disadvantage is that you need a plus machine to host your logstashs agents.
Modern Elasticsearch without the tuning
I moved to this from the AWS Elasticsearch service, and it's a breath of fresh air.
It includes XPack, and it's a modern version, which allows for some of the latest features.
The management interface is intuitive and provides a good level of flexibility vs ease of use.
Custom configuration can be added through the management portal into the elasticsearch.yml, and custom plugins can be installed.