[brasetvik]

(Disclaimer: I work on Elastic's Cloud team)

While AWS ES can be cheaper in some configurations, Elastic Cloud is actually quite competitive in pricing for larger clusters when compared to AWS' ES-service. This post compares the two services, and there's an example price comparison at the end of the post: https://www.elastic.co/blog/hosted-elasticsearch-services-ro...

We support most official plugins, and if you get a gold or platinum subscription you can upload your own plugins. Elastic's X-Pack is included in every cluster, which includes security features like role based access control.

It's not possible for external service providers to integrate with IAM at this point.

[bpicolo]

One issue I've found with Elastic Cloud is that there doesn't seem to be a horizontal scale-out option other than multi-DC or getting bigger boxes. Is horizontal scaling in the works? Easy horizontal scaling seems like one of the better benefits of ES.

Or, alternatively, am I mistaken about how configuration works?

[brasetvik]

Per availability zone, Elastic Cloud currently scales vertically (in power-of-two increments) until a cluster hits 64GiB memory, at which point multiple 64GiB-nodes are added. While you can run Elasticsearch with e.g. two 8GiB nodes per zone, we prefer a single 16GiB node as there's fewer things that can go wrong. (If you want the second 8GiB node for redundancy, then that's exactly what our multi-zone HA configurations are for, and we encourage HA setups by making them less than twice (or thrice) the price, throwing in additional master-only nodes for free)

(A bit of history: When Found (the company Elastic acquired and which is now Elastic Cloud) was in private beta in early 2012, we actually did allow custom cluster topologies. We ultimately disabled that as it was overwhelmingly used to make sub-optimal cluster configurations, such as 5 x 1GiB memory nodes)

[randerson]

Any idea if/when Elastic.co will support multiple user accounts and 2FA in the management portal? Not having those was a deal-breaker for us when we evaluated it awhile back, and was the sole reason we went with the less stable AWS service.

[brasetvik]

This is (understandably!) a common request, and both are on our roadmap.