Why do Elastic provide Crippleware on the AWS Marketplace

Elastic Observability APM
1

OK - I can understand why Elastic would cripple services from other providers that Elastic aren't paid for, such as Amazon's hosted service ( that's managed by Amazon ).

I can't understand however, why Elastic would limit features when they're being paid for, just because the payment is coming via the AWS Marketplace instead of directly to Elastic. Yes, it's slightly less crippled than the Amazon hosted version, but it's still crippled.

What adds injury to insult here, is that where the option for APM is normally shown, it's simply missing. If there was some text there to say that you hate Amazon, and don't want Amazon customers to be able to pay for your features, I could at least have saved the hour I spent re-tracing my steps trying to figure out where I missed the step to enable APM, only to find out later in some obscure part of the manual that it's not available on AWS.

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Could you provide some additional information about exactly what you set up? What exactly do you mean by crippled? As far as I can see from this link it should not be a crippled version.

3

APM (and Cross Cluster Search) is missing when you buy through Amazon.

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/ec-billing-aws.html

Some functional differences also exist for subscriptions billed through AWS Marketplace. To learn more, see APM with AWS Marketplace subscriptions or Cross-cluster search unavailable with AWS.

4

Hi Rory!

The lack of APM and certain other features from our AWS Marketplace offering is not intentional on our part. We are unable to offer those features today due to certain marketplace billing restrictions. We are actively working with Amazon on how best to meet billing requirements so we can make APM, CCS, and other upcoming features available to all our customers using our AWS marketplace offering.

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5

Interesting. What restrictions are there that apply to APM, but don't apply to Kibana?

6

AWS limits the number of pricing combinations a vendor can offer today on AWS marketplace. Due to this limitation we are unable to offer APM on our marketplace offering.

Having said that, I'd like to point out that Kibana offered via the AWS Marketplace includes the basic license and is fully APM capable. The pricing restriction only limits us from offering an APM hosted server. As a workaround, you could host your APM server in order to access and use APM.

We are working with AWS in parallel to meet billing requirements so we can overcome the current limitation and offer APM on our AWS marketplace offering. Hope this helps!

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