Commercial Elastic: Powerful 3-nodes cluster vs weak 30-nodes cluster

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I am wondering what is the difference between the cost of a powerful 3-nodes cluster (let's say, 320gb of RAM, tons of CPUs), vs a 30-nodes cluster but each node as 2gb RAM and 2 CPUs.

It seems that the 3-nodes cluster will be around 15k and the 30-nodes cluster 150k (unless I can negotiate a good deal).

This doesn't make decentralization cost-effective at all. This encourages having a 3-nodes cluster and simply on-boarding clients to it, increasing the RAM and CPU as needed. Am I right?

2

Why manage 30 things when you can manage 3 of them?

Your 3 nodes may become 30 nodes in the future, adding whatever hardware you can get ahold of at that time. CPU and RAM can only be increased so much per node before it becomes cost ineffective.

3

Good point, but each of my clients have their own small VM connected in VPN, I have about 30 clients that I resell Elastic to.

It would be awesome if I could make a cluster out of them, since their systems already exist: 30 weak systems would make a decent cluster.

But because of the way licensing works, 30 nodes would cost a fortune, about 5k per client (a total of 150K - my small business clients won't pay that much just to have reports and alerts!).

So now I have to create 3 new super powerful systems for the 3-nodes cluster, as I cannot leverage each of my client nodes, which are closer to their network, have tons of disk space, less latency, etc.

I think they should license per CPU/RAM instead of node, so a super powerful 3-nodes cluster at 60gb RAM and 60 CPUs, or a 30-nodes cluster but each node is 2gb RAM and 2 CPU cost the same. Maximum flexibility.

4

Elasticsearch requires low latency and good bandwidth between nodes so connecting small dispersed nodes into a cluster is generally not a good idea.

5

Have you discussed Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes ECK with the sales team that is license by RAM under management. So in theory 30 X 3 GB nodes and 3X30 GB nodes is about the same amount of RAM under management and that's about the equivalent cost.

Or another way to think what is you could run more smaller clusters about the same RAM as a fewer larger clusters.

It is a different license cost sold in 64 GB chunks.

So you could divide up your 320 GB RAM however you want.

6

If you are talking about Elastic Cloud, I tried but found it very limited. A lot of things they don't allow you to changes in the Elasticsearch settings.

But I will definitely ask them about this Kubernetes ECK licensing, I have not heard of it before.

Thanks for the suggestion!

7

Hi I'm not talking about Elastic Cloud I am referring to Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes.

It is self Managed way to deploy the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes using and Operator.

8

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