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Comment by greatjack613 | Hacker News Reader

TBH sounds like growing pains, I would imagine with the might of amazon engineering behind the hard-fork it will eventually surpass the original.

Question is when??

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Don’t bet on it. AWS Elasticsearch is really as bad as this article indicates.

Yeah, we ran a minor upgrade to our cluster earlier this week and it knocked out the entire cluster for over two hours, and we were getting AWS specific errors regarding hostname headers that we've never gotten before. I managed to get a developer advocate on twitter to lend us a hand, but if I had actually waited on support things would likely still be down.

Unfortunately that seems more like a trend with AWS- there are a lot of new services that feel like they're 80% ready for production, but which are being sold as complete solutoins.

Finishing things isn’t cool or sexy, don’tchaknow! Gotta get that MVP out the door and move onto the next project. It’s fine, you can iterate on it after re:Invent!

Agreed, this article captures my experience accurately as well.

That's a weird assumption to make.

AWS Elasticsearch is focused on providing minimum necessary functionality to sell instances.

Opensource Elasticsearch is focused on improving Elasticsearch.

Thats a valid point.

But don't you think the more features it has the more instances of it will sell?

Generally yes, but they can wait for Elasticsearch to implement them and port them over with less time/money spent.

I don't think they have a ton of incentive to surpass Elasticsearch, but just to lag behind at some reasonable rate

Its been this bad for a while, I think its just a stalled project inside of AWS or the people who work on it think it functions as designed...

I would have believed that. I was told by someone that "Amazon has a practice of launching early [with bugs] and then iterating"

But all the things in this article were true when I tried the Amazon Elasticsearch Service in 2016, so if they haven't fixed it in 3 years, what make you think they'll fix it soon?

Is the might of Amazon engineering really behind it though, or is that might behind a bunch of different things of varying importance. How much might can Amazon really bring to bear on any one project?

ES revenue can cover a lot of devs. But rephrasing: is ES the logging and visibility solution they are betting on, or is ES an 'ok to be 2nd for folks insisting on ES' and they plan to win with other cloud-native log/doc analytics tooling?

(Their crocodile smile on ethical open source practices through better operational excellence reads even thinner when seeing stuff like this tho.)

They've definitely been positioning it as the preferred solution. Our SA steered us towards it as a general search solution over their seemingly abandoned cloud search offering. The (also abandoned) AWS landing zone has an addon to stand up an ELK stack for you and no alternative afaik.

Really not obvious to me... just as MS released internal Kusto as a product, and Google did BigQuery, I've been curious if some internal more integrated Amazon tool would surface. E.g., see the direction of CloudWatch to go from metrics queries to log queries (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/07/cloudwatc...) and how GuardDuty is marching towards a modern SIEM. What the cloud vendors can do vs. splunk/elk/cisco makes it feel more like a "when" not "if". Zero judgement here on technical quality, this is just the nature of big tech co's.

Do most AWS teams use ES, or something else? Is CloudWatch Insights on a scaling & parity path?

Haven't used many AWS services have you? :D hahah

Remember the EBS garbage fest a couple years ago?

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