[jillesvangurp]

Open distro is definitely creating some pressure on ES. However, there are some misconceptions on what that is.

1) Amazon did not actually fork elasticsearch or maintains any patches against it.

2) Elasticsearch does in fact provide completely OSS distributions and docker images for their products.

3) Amazon has created several OSS plugins for Elasticsearch that they bundle with their open distro that compete directly with what Elasticsearch does in their non OSS add-ons to their product.

So, obviously Elasticsearch is responding to Amazon by ensuring there's little functional gap with the stuff you get for free.

I'd argue most new users are still better off on elastic cloud vs amazon's hosted version of their distro and should not be attempting to run this themselves. I've used both and would pick elastic cloud every time for the simple reason of being more reliable and easy to deal with (e.g. backups, upgrades, cluster topology changes, etc.). Also, it seems they are quite competitive on price/performance.

For reference, we pay about 170 Euro a month for a simple setup that takes care of all our logging (couple of GB worth of logs / day). I'd hate running blind without that. IMHO at those prices, self hosting is not worth the effort (devops time required to do it would pay for several years of hosting).

[jjeaff]

Regarding the docker images elastic provides, I find it odd that they are only hosted from their own servers (rather than docker hub) and I have looked all over the place to find the dockerfile they use to create those images.

It seems that they are hiding that info and it really locks you into only doing customizations that the docker image is directly built for.

I also don't like to pull images blindly. I generally fork the dockerfile source so that I can build the software from source and have a bit more control and knowledge of what I am installing.

[jillesvangurp]

After 1 google search: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

It includes a deep link straight into their repository right at the top: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/7.1/distributi...

In short, their Docker build process is part of the elasticsearch repository. So, it's actually part of their normal build process and not something that happens with a separate build in some different repository. Personally, I think this is a good practice.

That's for both the OSS and non OSS images. They produce these with every build. And they probably test them too, which I think is the responsible thing to do and something I'd expect from them.

They use gradle to build their docker images from a Docker file (https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/7.1/distributi...) that essentially untars the tar ball produced by their build. This looks pretty straightforward and free of magic steps.

So, read the source. It's all there. You can build from source or do your own thing. A variant of their Docker file where you just wget their tar ball shouldn't be that hard to do.

[timv]

Dockerfiles from v6.6 onwards are available at https://github.com/elastic/dockerfiles