[perryizgr8]

I don't know if this was part of the issues but adding authentication to Elastic APIs and Kibana is so confusing and complicated that it is almost impossible to do unless you go for a managed solution. I'm sure that one factor alone motivates a lot of users to buy the service instead of hosting their own using the available source.

[skywhopper]

Yeah, this is an underrated aspect of all the managed hosting options out there. If vendors made it easy to deploy their code, folks would be far more willing to run it themselves. But just rolling out a simple production-ready cluster of most software is a nightmare of complexity. (Note that while open-source software is often not great at this, proprietary software is often just as bad or worse. This is not a side-effect of open-source. It's a failure of prioritization of the operator experience.)