Some time ago I read an interesting article titled: “Is It the Same as Amazon’s Elasticsearch Service?“

It was quite a good article, to be honest, it compared perfectly 2 great elastic implementations: Elastic cloud from Elastic.co and Elasticsearch services from AWS.
Nevertheless, I thought the article was not fully objective, as it was mostly saying that AWS implementation was an Elastic Search fork of the Elastic Search mainstream and that was lacking all the capabilities that now Elastic cloud offers in the X-Pack package, This is amazing but costs a pretty penny!

In the end, both should be the same right? As Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Lucene and is developed in Java and is released as open source under the terms of the Apache License.

So both are offering the same product but with small differences, one is offering a ton of plugins provided by X-Pack, the other is relying on the current AWS services to match his rival.

At MagenTys I have worked with both and also with the On-Premises version of ELK, but I want to give you my opinion. Let’s take a closer look at both and also analyse a vital part of it, which is the cost.

Elastic Cloud

It’s the company behind the Elastic stack, that means Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash.

They officially support the Elasticsearch open source project, and at the same time offers a nice top layer of services around it, this is formerly known as X-Pack.

X-Pack is made of enterprise-grade security and developer-friendly APIs to machine learning, and graph analytics.This includes security, alerts, reporting, graph, machinelearning, Elasticsearch SQL and others.

It has a very nice cost calculator: https://cloud.elastic.co/pricing

Which we will be using for this article in order to compare it with AWS offering. For such purpose we will be comparing a t2.medium AWS instance.

Elasticsearch service AWS

Another alternative is Amazon Elasticsearch service, which is a fully managed service by AWS. This means it’s fully deployed, secured and ready to scale Elasticsearch.

It also allows us to ingest, search, analyse and visualise data in real-time. It offers Kibana access as well, and LogStash integration, but it lacks of the X-Pack, this means that some of the previous features we’ve seen such us users and group management and alerts are missing. This could be tackled with a different approach, letting AWS to manage the access to ES and Kibana using the “access policy” where we can whitelist ip addresses and apply access templates to IAM users. Also offers integration with Amazon Cognito for SSO and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and alerts.

Another advantage is that can be integrated in your VPCs.

Let’s take a look to the pricing:

$0.077 per t2.medium.elasticsearch instance hour (or partial hour) – EUW2 -720 Hrs – $55.44

$0.157 per GB-month of general purpose provisioned storage – EUW2 – 25.000 GB-Mo – $3.93

You need to pay standard AWS data transfer charges for the data transferred in and out of Amazon Elasticsearch Service. You will not be charged for the data transfer between nodes within your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service allows you to add data durability through automated and manual snapshots of your cluster. The service provides storage space for automated snapshots free of charge for each Amazon Elasticsearch domain and retains these snapshots for a period of 14 days. Manual snapshots are stored in Amazon S3 and incur standard Amazon S3 usage charges. Data transfer for using the snapshots is free of charge.

Data Transfer OUT From Amazon EC2 To Internet
Up to 1 GB / Month	$0.00 per GB
Next 9.999 TB / Month	$0.09 per GB
Next 40 TB / Month	$0.085 per GB
Next 100 TB / Month	$0.07 per GB
Greater than 150 TB / Month	$0.05 per GB

And last but not least, as X-Pack is not available, the plugins we discussed about before are not present.

Summarising