[Tomdarkness]

We've looked into using Elastic hosted Elasticsearch ourselves but what really put us off is that even if your whole cluster fails the only support method you get is a forum. You have to purchase a support package for the whole of Elasticsearch at some unspecified price just to get proper support for the hosted service itself. We don't want support for using Elasticsearch just for the hosted service we're paying for.

[jdc0589]

the "unspecified" price is a lot. I think they reworked their pricing structure sometime around ElastiCon this year, but prior to that a subscription (which includes support, and all their products; only way they sold stuff then) was ~$5k /server/year.

I think it may be cheaper now though.

[padelt]

Got a price slightly above that in EUR. A cluster of 1 to 5 nodes should go for ~24.000€ (customer would've been SMB non-IT enduser company). My gut reaction was: Insane. They do include infrastructure consulting, support and the premium plugins as part of that. So at least if you can grab lots of consulting that way I can see where they are going. Then again, needing lots of consulting is a problem in itself. And I guess operating Elasticsearch is not for the faint of heart anyway...

[beachstartup]

everyone wants competent 24/7 support, but nobody wants to pay for it.

smart people cost a lot of money, having them on call at any time of the day or night costs even more money.

[robalfonso]

Agreed, however, their model should include a base level of direct support for straightforward things. Like "my cluster is unresponsive" right now thats a forum post and seems a really poor experience.

[beachstartup]

"my cluster is unresponsive" is not straightforward at all. in fact it's the vaguest, most un-straightforward kind of problem you could have.

one of the interview questions i ask is "a customer calls in and said their system is unresponsive. what do you do?"

this will weed out a bullshitter 99% of the time, because the potential problem domain is the entire OSI stack, across the open internet, and also could be potentially on the customer side, which is most likely also a complex setup.

if you want someone who can actually fix the problem to help you, it's going to cost a lot of money. one of these people is six figures. now imagine a whole team of them, 3 shifts a day, every single day, forever.

[robalfonso]

You miss my point, I simply mean a forum post is not ideal for support. In my case I would want a ticket, something concrete I know can be sent and seen. A forum does not engender confidence my issue will be seen and also I would not want to put private info into a forum.

Also I gave a poor example. I run a Es cluster so my thinking is at the point of my cluster is unavailable i know it's all red and it's not between my service and the endpoint.

[karambahh]

I got a similar quote about a year ago. They now have a "startup" price which is lower [under nda]. Still too costly with regards to our usage/level of confidence in our own expertise but they are adjusting their pricing.

[notyourwork]

I have not priced Elastic or AWS offerings but wonder how that would compare to AWS.

[namidark]

Last I checked a month or so ago it was still around 5-7k per node so that sounds accurate