Limitations

Feedback we've heard from customers

  • Outdated release version
  • And it’s expensive

No Shield, Watcher, and Marvel support

Elasticsearch has released many commercial products: Shield for security, Watcher for alerts and notifications, and Marvel for cluster monitoring. They are really useful and come out-of-box with Elasticsearch. There are many such plugins, like Sense, kopf, and river, that were developed for Elasticsearch administrators and developers. You can certainly use AWS’s IAM and Cloudwatch in place of Shield and Marvel, but choosing those will sometimes add extra costs and often new skills. If you already have Shield, Watcher, and Marvel licenses, and you’re just moving your existing Elasticsearch cluster to Amazon, then those licenses will be of no use.

Outdated release version

Amazon Elasticsearch currently uses following package versions:

Elasticsearch 1.5.2
Kibana 4 (also Kibana 3 as a plugin).
Plugins: jetty, cloud-aws, kuromoji, and icu.
The following APIs:

/_alias, /_aliases, /_all, /_analyze, /_bulk, /_cat, /_cluster/health, /_cluster/settings, /_cluster/stats, /_count, /_flush, /_mapping, /_mget, /_msearch, /_nodes, /_plugin/kibana, /_plugin/kibana3, /_percolate, /_refresh, /_search, /_snapshot, /_stats, /status, /_template 1

/_alias, /_aliases, /_all, /_analyze, /_bulk, /_cat, /_cluster/health, /_cluster/settings, /_cluster/stats, /_count, /_flush, /_mapping, /_mget, /_msearch, /_nodes, /_plugin/kibana, /_plugin/kibana3, /_percolate, /_refresh, /_search, /_snapshot, /_stats, /status, /_template

  • data loss issues that were fixed in 1.7.x and later versions
    • suffer multiple node failures while having idle shards

  • Dynamic queries, e.g. Groovy scripts

    Are you seeing that in real-world usage? "Not really. My customers just denormalize the data."

Should ES be used as a primary datastore?

Should ES be used as a datastore? In 2.0, they have focused on resiliency, durability...

  • They are trying to move to a 6-week release cycle.