Detailed deployment comparison
This reference provides detailed comparisons of features and capabilities across Elastic's deployment options: self-managed deployments, Elastic Cloud Hosted, and Serverless. For a high-level overview of deployment types and guidance on choosing between them, see the overview.
For more details about feature availability in Serverless, check Compare Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless.
| Feature/capability | Self-managed | Elastic Cloud Hosted | 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 | Self-managed | Elastic Cloud Hosted | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Any infrastructure | Elastic Cloud through AWS, Azure, or GCP | Elastic Cloud through AWS or Azure |
| Hardware configuration | Full control | Limited control | Managed by Elastic |
| Autoscaling | No | Available | Automatic |
| Data tiers management | Through ILM policies | Available | No data tiers |
| Snapshot management | Custom | Available | Managed by Elastic |
| High availability and disaster recovery | Available | Available | Managed by Elastic |
| Shard management and replicas | Available | Available | Managed by Elastic |
| Feature/capability | Self-managed | Elastic Cloud Hosted | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment health monitoring | Monitoring cluster | AutoOps or monitoring cluster | Managed by Elastic |
| Alerting | Watcher or Kibana alerts | Watcher or Kibana alerts | Alerts (why?) |
| Feature/capability | Self-managed | Elastic Cloud Hosted | 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 | Self-managed | Elastic Cloud Hosted | 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 |
| Cross cluster replication | Available | Available | Planned |
| Feature/capability | Self-managed | Elastic Cloud Hosted | Serverless |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advanced testing and development | Available | No | No |
| Java (JVM) customization | Available | No | No |