My understanding, after much troubleshooting and experimenting on his part, is that the minimal difference between working and crashing on startup are the path.logs directory permissions/ownership, no difference in elasticsearch configuration, merely the version:
These directories are EFS mounts, which is the only known way to reproduce the issue, and it only works at all for the latter (50017) case, even in previous versions, due to the fsGroup options that k8s allows.
He’s now stuck. And as you noted:
None of us can yet see how the permissions/ownership of the log directory connect to the error he sees. Whether there’s an underlying elasticsearch bug or not, the error message that he sees is really unhelpful. Thus it’s an interesting puzzle, which is primarily why it interested me, but I’ve reached end of my road.
Often posters here don’t do much to help themselves. By contrast, I think @buitcj has made considerable efforts. We’re almost at “Help me, Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope.” 