[nemo44x]

Yeah it’s amazing how much potential that company had and then blew it with a series of questionable business decisions. They had a ton of really quality talent too but much of it has moved on the last few years.

Pretty much everything MongoDB did right, Elastic did the opposite and failed. Instead of being the best place to run Elasticsearch, one of the most popular open source projects ever, they blew all that brand equity on a series of mediocre solutions that were outcompeted.

[dbattaglia]

As someone that worked at Elastic for 4.5 years on the Elastic Cloud team and really loved it there for the majority of that time, I saddens me to admit it but this is spot on. Despite all their best efforts, everyone I've ever spoken to just wants to run the "ELK stack" and doesn't care about their confusing solutions strategy.

One thing about Elastic is that their roots are in on-prem / self-managed software and selling support to enterprise customers. This led to our cloud strategy being based around ECE (Elastic Cloud Enterprise), with the idea we would eventually fully unify this on-prem version of our Cloud product with our actual SaaS, and just run ECE "at scale". During that time we got stuck in the slower Elasticsearch "quarterly minor + monthly patch" release cycle (SaaS did have a shorter one but it was also troubled) and spent countless engineering effort troubleshooting enterprise customer's own infrastructure (imagine stuff like "ohhh, I see, you V-Motioned a server hosting ZooKeeper containers, and you're running on spinning disks" after 2 weeks+ of back and forth). We couldn't easily add table-stakes features to our SaaS because we needed it to run on-prem too, even though ECE is very limited in the types of supporting infrastructure we could add (basically just ZooKeeper and Elasticsearch). I think they are trying to move past this strategy and onto a SaaS-only K8s based approach but I fear too much time was squandered. I hope I'm proven wrong.

[nemo44x]

Thanks for the info - it just sounds like a completely bizarre approach. Like, why even make it the same (SaaS and OSS versions)? If you're going to do SaaS ELK then why not just do that and add whatever features you need to be better than DataDog or w/e? Make the SaaS ELK better than a version anyone could even imagine self managing.

It's especially weird to me because if I was a casual user then I wouldn't even know Elastic had anything to do with Elasticsearch. You certainly wouldn't know it from their webpage. I literally see this at the top:

"Accelerate results that matter, across any cloud. Easily deploy anywhere, and extend the value of Elastic with cloud-native features."

What does this even mean? How is the marketing department not 100% of these layoffs, lol?! why is a so-called SaaS company talking to me about deploying to any cloud and what even is "Elastic" and just what problem is it solving?

This is so bad it's hilarious.

You have to scroll for awhile to even see the word "Elasticsearch" and I don't see anything about ELK anywhere.

What pathetic execution. You were smart to leave that place!

[terrywang]

Thanks for the input. Had similar experience with solution based on top of on-prem flavour (gravity - name came from pulling stuff from cloud back into traditional data centre) of k8s. Countless effort and resources have been wasted on troubleshooting customers' infrastructure rather than focusing on the real goal, get apps/APIs up and running quickly to generate value and realise goals for the business. The solution ultimately become a burden to both engineering and customers... Long sad / bad story.

Fortunately, decision makes heard the voice from the field and customers, eventually offloaded the container orchestration layer (and underlying infrastructure) to managed k8s service provider, the solution is delivered as helm charts to be installed on customers' own managed k8s (EKS, AKS, GKE and OpenShift - oh, the Red Hat OpenShi(f)t is just another rabbit hole...). But again, lack of knowledge and hands-on skill operating / running k8s (not yet a commodity although it is hyped to be...) makes the journey quite turbulent from a business PoV (technically it's easy, built the skills in house, hire the right talents).

[sthatipamala]

Where can I read about this? I’m not familiar with their history.

[nemo44x]

Just look at their awful website. What do they sell? They want me to buy an Algolia competitor or something?

You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company.

Go to Mongo - immediately shows me a value proposition of building software with MongoDB in their cloud.

The exec leadership at Elastic is very low quality.

[gedy]

> You wouldn’t even know they are the Elasticsearch company.

When I interviewed there a couple years ago, was told by a leader they are trying to not just be "the Elasticsearch company". (Due to competition from AWS OpenSearch)

[nemo44x]

I would have left the interview right there. All they did was concede Elasticsearch to AWS, a brand worth 10’s of billions.

Had they executed their Elasticsearch cloud story would have been top notch and then they could put solutions behind it as additional upgrades. Instead they have a confusing story and aren’t a leader in anything they do.

Just a terribly sad outcome for a company that had everything going for them.