Hosted vs Self-Managed

• Using a self-managed cluster appears cheaper as far as monthly quoted costs go

• Self-managed clusters allows greater control over configuration settings

• Greater control over access to data

• Costs for self-managed option should take operations effort in consideration

• Hosted ElasticSearch is likely operated by ElasticSearch specialists than enterprise operation generalists

• Ideally hosted option eliminates the need for over-planning

• Aws hosted ElasticSearch asks for number and type of ec2 instances to run on

• Bonsai.io pre-sale engineers asking for data volumes and usage patterns instead

• Sample quote from Bonsai.io: $2,950/mo for 1.5TB of raw data coming at 50kbps for index-mostly usage pattern

• Compare that to cost of self-management: hardware and ongoing operation cost