Using self-managed or hosted Elastic Cloud solution - pros and cons?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I am looking at using ElasticSearch to improve our full-text search within my application - I am not sure whether to go with a self managed version that I will install manually myself or use something like Elastic Cloud which is a hosted solution.

Is there a definitive guide with a breakdown of pros and cons of using self-managed or hosted solutions (not just Elastic Cloud but others too)

2

It's no different from any other self-managed or hosted application/service/platform.

The important question to answer is where you can add the most value, dealing with infrastructure or coding your application.