Compare Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless

Elastic Cloud Hosted Serverless

This guide compares Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments with Elastic Cloud Serverless projects, highlighting key features and capabilities across different project types. Use this information to understand what's available in each deployment option or to plan migrations between platforms.

Elastic Cloud Serverless takes a fundamentally different approach to running the Elastic Stack compared to Elastic Cloud Hosted:

In Serverless, Elastic automatically manages:

• Cluster scaling and optimization
• Node management and allocation
• Shard distribution and replication
• Resource utilization and monitoring
• High availability and disaster recovery strategies

This table compares the core platform capabilities between Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments and Serverless projects:

This table compares Elasticsearch capabilities between Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments and Serverless projects:

This table compares Observability capabilities between Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments and Serverless projects:

This table compares Security capabilities between Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments and Serverless projects:

To ensure optimal performance in Serverless Elasticsearch projects, follow these sizing recommendations:

For large datasets that exceed the recommended maximum size, consider splitting your data across smaller indices and using an alias to search them collectively.

These recommendations do not apply to indices using better binary quantization (BBQ). Refer to vector quantization for more information.

Because Elastic Cloud Serverless manages infrastructure automatically, certain Elasticsearch APIs are not available:

Infrastructure operations

• All _nodes/* operations
• All _cluster/* operations
• Most _cat/* operations, except for index-related operations such as /_cat/indices and /_cat/aliases

Storage and backup

• All _snapshot/* operations
• Repository management operations

Index management

• indices/close operations
• indices/open operations
• Recovery and stats operations
• Force merge operations

When attempting to use an unavailable API, you'll receive this error:

{
 "error": {
   "root_cause": [
     {
       "type": "api_not_available_exception",
       "reason": "Request for uri [/<API_ENDPOINT>] with method [<METHOD>] exists but is not available when running in serverless mode"
     }
   ],
   "status": 410
 }
}

In Elastic Cloud Serverless Elasticsearch projects, you can only configure index-level settings. Cluster-level settings and node-level settings are fully managed by Elastic.

Available settings

Index-level settings: Settings that control how documents are processed, stored, and searched are available to end users. These include:

• Analysis configuration
• Mapping parameters
• Search/query settings
• Indexing settings such as refresh_interval

Managed settings

Infrastructure-related settings: Settings that affect cluster resources or data distribution are not available to end users. These include:

• Node configurations
• Cluster topology
• Shard allocation
• Resource management

• Elastic Cloud Serverless roadmap: See upcoming features and development plans for the Serverless platform
• Elasticsearch Serverless API reference: Check out the complete list of available APIs in Elastic Cloud Serverless
• Project settings: Configure project settings in Elastic Cloud Serverless
• Serverless regions: Choose the right region for your Elastic Cloud Serverless project
• Elastic Cloud pricing: Understand pricing for Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless projects
  • Serverless project billing: Understand billing dimensions for Serverless projects
  • Elastic Cloud Hosted billing: Understand billing dimensions for Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments