88 engineers on Hacker News describe using Elasticsearch first-hand: 16 endorse it, 12 regret it, 8 are mixed.
“I've defaulted to elasticsearch myself.”
endorse · production · internet_points · 2025-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a 35-node cluster with ~ 240TB of disk, 4.5TB of RAM, and about 100TB of documents”
endorse · production · heipei · 2025-08-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've also found running Elastic yourself requires constant maintenance, while Loki has been very hands-off.”
regret · production · parliament32 · 2025-03-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But it became clear we were paying for gobs of RAM that we weren't using”
regret · production · rpdillon · 2024-08-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At my previous job (Cloudflare), we migrated from Elasticsearch to ClickHouse and saved nearly 10x reduction in data size and got 5x perf improvement.”
regret · production · pradeepchhetri · 2024-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated away from an Elastic stack to a Loki stack, and were able to store order of magnitude more data for less money.”
regret · production · jaachan · 2024-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using elastic index for a while now. The best way I have found is to use a hybrid search”
endorse · production · shouche · 2023-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched to holding that data in Elasticsearch. Now we have 2 problems: running Elasticsearch and keeping the data in Elasticsearch in sync with MySQL.”
regret · production · pbowyer · 2023-10-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It is such a dream compared to Elasticsearch, that we migrated from.”
regret · production · bratao · 2023-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If your use case is faster search - ES cloud is way more efficient/performs better than AWS.”
endorse · production · nirmalc · 2022-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a cluster for ingesting logs, and it's much cheaper. The clustering part is basically painless.”
endorse · production · vladvasiliu · 2022-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use a lot of Elasticsearch because that's what I've been using for the last decade. Done right, Elasticsearch makes for a nice key value store”
endorse · production · 10 yr · jillesvangurp · 2022-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we moved to self-hosted Elastic. It's better but still pricey and requires more manhours dedicated to tuning.”
mixed · production · clambordan · 2022-02-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“having to janitor index policies, sharding, lifecycle policies, VM resources, etc. etc., which you have to do even with the managed Elastic Cloud offer, is way too much effort”
regret · production · piaste · 2021-09-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they didn't offer compute-heavy nodes, but our application was compute heavy, so we migrated the company to AWS ElasticSearch.”
regret · production · rpdillon · 2021-08-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched to ES and we're not looking back.”
endorse · production · xcambar · 2021-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we were running ES in prod on self hosted instances back in 2012.”
endorse · production · chrisco255 · 2021-01-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The AWS version of ES has been abysmal- it's only saving grace is that it's "in the ecosystem"”
regret · production · dijit · 2021-01-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It worked really well, but as our query rate increased, our queries' geographic component... created high CPU usage on our cluster.”
mixed · production · rpdillon · 2021-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Elasticsearch since 2012. I also used Solr and Lucene before that. It's an awesome product.”
endorse · production · 8 yr · jillesvangurp · 2020-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Logging is much more fiddly, and required a large up front investment. Now it's running though, we get a lot of value”
mixed · production · lawrjone · 2020-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We ditched Elastic as it was a super massive PITA to operate (& a resource hog at that).”
regret · production · jrudolph · 2020-01-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it for years professionally, and it's an amazing tool but not safe with regard to data integrity / durability.”
mixed · production · jaytaylor · 2019-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I haven't seen indices getting corrupted in the last 4 years of having worked with it in production systems heavily.”
endorse · production · 4 yr · aprdm · 2019-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The other part I like about ES is how it's easy to scale out across machines, which lets us handle quite a bit of load and tolerate failures easily.”
endorse · production · flexer2 · 2019-07-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's been running amazingly for us. We've halved our storage and running costs by moving from 5 to 6.”
endorse · production · tedk-42 · 2019-05-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated from ES, and it is truly next-gen compared to ES”
regret · production · bratao · 2019-03-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) quite heavily for this at my company. It works, and it works well. It's expensive. Very expensive.”
mixed · production · zenexer · 2018-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been running large Elasticsearch clusters as our primary search/analytics engine... As much as I love Elasticsearch, I definitely wouldn't be able to sleep at night”
mixed · production · KennyCason · 2018-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using the ELK stack as a time series database for a long time”
endorse · production · aprdm · 2018-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Took me by surprise even though I ran the migration plugin. ... This results in 80% less IOPS in my case.”
mixed · production · wvl0 · 2018-02-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“You're spot on with the bottleneck being Elasticsearch, but the latest releases in the 2.x train have a lot of fine adjustments that have drastically improved our indexing rate”
mixed · production · packetized · 2016-09-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we need document semantics we have a pretty robust Elasticsearch setup.”
endorse · production · jolynch · 2016-06-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The fickle nature of cluster restarts/upgrades were frustrating along with the unassigned & lost indexes”
regret · production · eyepulp · 2016-03-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Latency is a big one for us and is a large part of why we use ElasticSearch.”
endorse · production · codewright · 2012-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“combining MongoDB with ElasticSearch and it's been a wonderfully pain-free experience.”
endorse · personal · 0.4 yr · hackDaily · 2011-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it managed to completely bring down my entire elasticsearch cluster. never again.”
neutral · personal · aspectrr · 2026-05-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“eventually replaced with Elasticsearch after a few years of R&D, but I digress”
neutral · production · Moto7451 · 2025-02-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“subsequent projects I've joined have all used ES.”
neutral · production · lastofthemojito · 2024-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“before we moved to Elastic Search.”
neutral · production · anshumankmr · 2023-05-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Elasticsearch to store a vast amount of JSON documents in a specific format.”
neutral · production · 9dev · 2023-03-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Aurora Postgres x 3 for now, a large ES cluster, 2x redis clusters, memcached etc.”
neutral · production · wlll · 2022-10-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“running our backing services (RDS, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Redis) on AWS”
neutral · production · geoffharcourt · 2022-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We added a managed redis, database, and elasticsearch to this.”
neutral · production · jillesvangurp · 2022-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run several stateful workloads, including ElasticSearch and MongoDB, in GKE.”
neutral · production · anchochilis · 2022-08-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to OpenSearch from Elastic, as we have an open source platform.”
neutral · production · jamesblonde · 2022-03-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We used Dynamo, ElasticSearch, Lambda and could make it running in 60 days”
neutral · production · artembugara · 2022-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Postgres/Elastic for storage (depending on the balance performance/flexibility)”
neutral · production · gjulianm · 2021-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I spent this weekend removing Elasticsearch usage in our project.”
neutral · production · mihaic · 2021-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use Elasticsearch and have used it for the past 10 years, I have deployed ES clusters myself”
neutral · production · 10 yr · piva00 · 2021-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Add journalbeat to ship the logs to elasicsearch.”
neutral · production · jeppesen-io · 2021-05-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we had large indexing to do to ELasticSearch, Read Replicas would autoscale.”
neutral · production · scarface74 · 2020-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“and ES with text search (2K queries per second) in MongoDB on 16 CPU core nodes in our cluster.”
neutral · production · truth_seeker · 2020-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Yes, Elastic is part of our stack, alongside a lot of other interesting technology.”
neutral · production · timgarner0 · 2019-07-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we also have an ElasticSearch operator that is used to deploy ElasticSearch on Kubernetes”
neutral · production · DasIch · 2018-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have utilized ElasticSearch, Redis, couchbase and memcached for specific caching or search purposes”
neutral · production · davismwfl · 2018-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We currently run Elasticsearch on bare EC2 instances in our most critical setups for that reason.”
neutral · production · spectre256 · 2018-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched over some non-essential data to json. ... (elasticsearch still indexes it).”
neutral · production · chrisan · 2018-02-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run ES on G1GC, have been doing this for the last 3 years.”
neutral · production · 3 yr · notimetorelax · 2017-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“launches all services required (e.g. apache, mysql, sshd, elasticsearch) by running "service XYZ start"”
neutral · production · mschuster91 · 2017-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using docker in production with Elasticsearch and MySQL for 3 years in the PB scale”
neutral · production · 3 yr · k2xl · 2017-02-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use Ruby, Go, and elastic search”
neutral · production · sytse · 2016-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm trying to replace some clustering currently done with Elasticsearch with postgis”
neutral · production · Fiahil · 2016-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“have our data services (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB) join the rest of our apps on Kube-orchestrated infrastructure”
neutral · production · chrissnell · 2016-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use Elasticsearch as the storage layer.”
neutral · production · capkutay · 2016-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run many different types of data services, mysql/hadoop/hbase/kafka/redis/zookeeper/elasticsearch/etc”
neutral · production · paulfurtado · 2016-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So for now we switched back to ES for AP stuff and Rethink for CP stuff.”
neutral · production · ralfn · 2016-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For development environments we are running MSSQL, Elasticsearch, Mongo, Kafka, Zookeeper, Redis, Memcached”
neutral · production · paultyng · 2016-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Rails was indexing its data in Elasticsearch already so we could start serving data through node.js immediately”
neutral · production · mehwoot · 2016-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated all of our high volume data into other stores-- analytics into DynamoDB, searchable data into ElasticSearch, etc.”
neutral · production · jkodumal · 2016-09-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“use ELK for text logs. Grafana can add annotations from ElasticSearch”
neutral · production · coredog64 · 2016-05-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run redis and elastic search on CentOS”
neutral · production · sklivvz1971 · 2016-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“alert on events that are recorded in Elasticsearch”
neutral · production · chrissnell · 2016-04-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“if the code needs redis, or elasticsearch or whatever it's easier to spin up a local container”
neutral · production · markbnj · 2016-03-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Toss a JSON object into redis with a rpush then logstash shoves it in elasticsearch”
neutral · production · j0rd · 2015-07-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated databases, added ElasticSearch for full text search (which wasn't an issue yet)”
neutral · production · davismwfl · 2015-07-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The last site I worked on consisted of nginx, elasticsearch, logstash, kibana, postgresql, celery, redis”
neutral · production · markbnj · 2015-07-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“one of the projects I inherited used Bonsai Elasticsearch when I first took it over.”
neutral · production · mathgeek · 2015-01-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Elasticsearch as our ad hoc query layer on top of TokuMX”
neutral · production · cheald · 2014-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In production I've used Oracle DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Google Cloud Datastore, Redis, RedShift and Elasticsearch.”
neutral · production · nielskrijger · 2014-10-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We do the same thing for redis, Elasticsearch, etc.”
neutral · production · Nick-Craver · 2014-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The second example is elasticsearch. We have a container set up to have cluster and host data injected into it”
neutral · personal · markbnj · 2014-03-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“flattening the structure that was represented in 20-30 tables down into a smaller set of documents in ES.”
neutral · production · cliftonc · 2013-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use linux for: redis, elasticsearch, HAProxy, DNS (bind), nginx, mail (exim) apache, wordpress, mysql, nexpose, backups, puppet, asterix, android builds and our internal mercurial.”
neutral · production · Nick-Craver · 2013-10-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we do have some logstash machines still pushing stuff to elastic search for low traffic applications we run.”
neutral · production · benmmurphy · 2013-08-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for queries where that would be required we do the actual querying with ElasticSearch”
neutral · production · bobfunk · 2012-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We still use ES for core application search (tickets etc)”
neutral · production · prateekdayal · 2012-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're building a web service driven by PHP, Javascript, Elastic Search, and Redis.”
neutral · production · chrisamccoy · 2011-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?