My guess, from AWS experience, is that you're right. What specific pain points did you experience?

Other services are great. Aws es is just put together. It goes down, blue green updates take forever, arbitrary disk limits etc.

Yeah at my last gig we used AWS’ offering. Blue green deployments would hit a race condition and the new cluster would never come up, requiring a ticket to be filed. Important APIs and settings were disallowed.

Horrible service. That’s why it’s ironic that Elastic just shot themselves in the foot with this licensing change. So foolish.