Remote cluster: licensing question

Hello!

The ECK automagic setup of remote clusters is locked behind the Enterprise subscription tier, whereas Elasticsearch itself allows cross-cluster search on a Basic license and only requires a higher one for cross-cluster replication.
Is there a particular reason for that? Struck me as a little odd, but maybe there's a fundamental reason?

That is all! Simple question... :slight_smile:

Its is just an artifact of the licensing for ECK... Simple Answer :wink:

ECE which is a pseudo Equivalent of ECK requires and Enterprise License as well... for everything.

We provided ECK with a basic license that provide lots of functionality... CCS just landed on the commercial side.

Hi again, thanks a lot for the prompt reply!

I'm not quite sure I fully understood, though, hahah.
Are you saying that because it's used in ECE those restrictions need to be present in ECK as well?
Or that, on the contrary, you would be open to accept a PR removing those specific license checks?

No, I was just drawing a comparison. ECE and ECK are separate products.

I was just saying that there is enormous amount of free value in ECK and the cross cluster just happens to be a licensed feature... At some point we do actually have to pay the more than 700 software engineers that work for elastic. :slight_smile:

No, I don't think opening a PR to change the commercial feature to a free feature makes sense but you're welcome to try.

Ah ok. Sorry I misunderstood!

Right, not a huge deal since it's more a quality of life issue: manually setting up CAs and cluster settings is not difficult. I was just surprised basic licensing allows using the ES feature but not the automatic ECK setup; allowing either both or neither would have seemed more consistent. :smiley:

Yeah of course! I do hope you are getting enough paying customers to continue offering this great tool!

I thought here was a more appropriate place to ask about the licensing status of that feature and whether the Elastic team was open to changing it, rather than directly making a PR in github, but you're saying I should actually do that to move the discussion over there? Or am I misunderstanding again? Hahahah.

To be direct, I'm not sure that there is a preferred method for having a feature free versus commercial licensed discussion. So you're welcome to open a PR.

A lot of thought goes into what is free versus commercial license and even with that it doesn't always make sense to everyone.

This is just a discuss forum managed by volunteers some of us just happen to work for elastic.

In some way you're making your own argument for why this is a commercial feature And I think this line's up with our product folks.

ECK It's becoming one of the preferred deployment options for Enterprise companies and there is value to reducing the overhead, time to market, speed value for the SREs or DevOps teams that are running elastic.

Also, enterprises are more likely to use cross cluster replication and cross cluster search.

That's my understanding... Perfect. No but that is where it lays today.

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That makes a lot of sense, thanks!

My argument does remain that since ES CCS is a Basic feature, the corresponding ECK deployment option might as well be, too (since it doesn't change whether or not it can be used in ES). But indeed I would understand the licensing team to take either stance.

Anyway, unless/until it turns out to be a problem, I'll leave it to rest instead of bothering more people about it on github (though I could do much worse if I really wanted to bother more people on github, eheheh...).

And thanks a lot for your time, once again!

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