Detailed deployment comparison
This reference provides detailed comparisons of features and capabilities across Elastic's deployment options: fully self-managed clusters, Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE), Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK), Elastic Cloud Hosted (ECH), and Elastic Cloud Serverless. For a high-level overview of deployment types and guidance on choosing between them, refer to the Deploy and manage overview.
For more details about feature availability in Serverless, refer to Compare Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless.
| Feature/capability | Fully self-managed, ECE, ECK | ECH | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security configurations | Full control | Limited control | Limited control |
| Authentication realms | Available | Available | Available, through Elastic Cloud only |
| Custom roles | Available | Available | Available |
| Audit logging | Available | Available | No |
| Feature/capability | Fully self-managed | ECE | ECK | ECH | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Any infrastructure | Any infrastructure | Any infrastructure | Elastic Cloud through AWS, Azure, or GCP | Elastic Cloud through AWS, Azure, or GCP |
| Hardware configuration | Full control | Full control | Full control | Limited control | Managed by Elastic |
| Autoscaling | No | Available | Available | Available | Automatic |
| Data tier management | Through ILM policies | Through ILM policies | Through ILM policies | Available | No data tiers |
| Snapshot management | Custom | Custom | Available | Available | Managed by Elastic |
| High availability and disaster recovery | Available | Available | Available | Available | Managed by Elastic |
| Shard management and replicas | Available | Available | Available | Available | Managed by Elastic |
| Feature/capability | Fully self-managed, ECE, ECK | ECH | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment health monitoring | AutoOps or monitoring cluster | AutoOps or monitoring cluster | Managed by Elastic |
| Alerting | Watcher or Kibana alerts | Watcher or Kibana alerts | Alerts (why?) |
| Feature/capability | Fully self-managed, ECE, ECK | ECH | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data lifecycle management | ILM, data tiers, data stream lifecycle | ILM, data tiers, data stream lifecycle | Data stream lifecycle (why?) |
| Snapshot management | Custom | Available | Managed by Elastic |
| Feature/capability | Fully self-managed, ECE, ECK | ECH | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom plugins and bundles | Available | Available | No |
| Self-managed connectors | Available | Limited | Limited |
| Elasticsearch-Hadoop integration | Available | Available | No |
| Cross cluster search (CCS) | Available | Available | Planned (as cross project search) |
| Cross cluster replication | Available | Available | Planned |
| Feature/capability | Fully self-managed, ECE, ECK | ECH | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advanced testing and development | Available | No | No |
| Java (JVM) customization | Available | No | No |