Originally announced via GlobeNewswire on March 30, 2020. Source: globenewswire.com
Instaclustr Adds Managed Elasticsearch to Its Open Source Data Platform
Instaclustr, a provider of fully managed open source data infrastructure, announced the general availability of Instaclustr Managed Elasticsearch on March 30, 2020. The service runs on AWS and is built on the Open Distro for Elasticsearch — making Instaclustr the first managed service provider to offer Open Distro for Elasticsearch outside of AWS’s own native service.
Elasticsearch joins Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, and Apache Spark on the Instaclustr Managed Platform, giving enterprises a single destination for deploying, managing, and monitoring the full open source data layer.
Why Elasticsearch Matters for Enterprise Search and Analytics
Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene and was first released under the Apache 2.0 open source license roughly a decade before this announcement. It has since become the de-facto distributed search and analytics engine for enterprises, valued for:
- Linear horizontal scalability — clusters can grow incrementally as data and query volumes increase.
- Real-time search and analytics — near-instantaneous indexing and querying across large datasets.
- High availability and fault tolerance — distributed architecture with built-in replication keeps clusters resilient.
- Flexible data ingestion — supports structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from virtually any source.
Despite these advantages, operating Elasticsearch at production scale is technically demanding. Tuning shard allocation, managing cluster state, handling rolling upgrades, and ensuring security compliance all require significant in-house expertise — resources that many engineering teams would rather direct toward product development.
Open Distro for Elasticsearch: A Fully Open Source Foundation
Instaclustr’s service is based on the Open Distro for Elasticsearch, an AWS-sponsored distribution that adds enterprise security, alerting, SQL query support, and performance analysis tooling on top of the 100% Apache 2.0-licensed Elasticsearch core. By choosing Open Distro rather than Elastic’s own commercial distribution, Instaclustr avoids the “open core” licensing model that can introduce vendor lock-in and unpredictable license costs for customers.
Instaclustr also claimed to be the first provider in the industry to offer enterprise support contracts for the Open Distro for Elasticsearch, including support for customers running self-managed or on-premises Elasticsearch installations.
Key Features of Instaclustr Managed Elasticsearch
The managed service includes the following capabilities at general availability:
- Cluster provisioning and configuration via the Instaclustr Management Console or REST APIs.
- Initial cloud support on AWS, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform planned for future availability.
- Easy horizontal scaling to handle growing data volumes and search traffic.
- Flexible billing models — run clusters under Instaclustr’s cloud account at a fixed, infrastructure-inclusive price, or bring your own preferred cloud provider account.
- Private Network Cluster deployments, including the ability to deploy within an existing AWS VPC to eliminate cross-VPC network transfer costs.
- Security — encryption of data in transit and at rest, access control via IP allowlists or security groups, and SOC 2 compliance.
- Automated daily backups and point-in-time restore.
- Assisted zero-downtime migration onto the Instaclustr platform from existing deployments.
- Continual monitoring and alerting for cluster health and performance.
- SLAs up to 99.99% availability for production deployments.
- 24×7 expert support with defined support SLAs.
- Ongoing plugin additions — the feature set was committed to expand post-launch.
What This Means for DevOps and Platform Teams
For DevOps and platform engineering teams evaluating Elasticsearch-as-a-Service in 2020, Instaclustr’s announcement introduced a meaningful alternative to AWS’s own Elasticsearch Service (now Amazon OpenSearch Service). The key differentiators at launch were:
- 100% open source stack with no proprietary add-ons that could create future licensing exposure.
- Multi-cloud roadmap, reducing long-term dependency on a single cloud provider.
- Support for self-managed and on-premises Open Distro installations — useful for hybrid or regulated environments.
- Bring-your-own-account option, which can simplify cost allocation and cloud commitment management for enterprises with existing cloud spend agreements.
“Adding a new technology to the Instaclustr Managed Platform is never a decision we take lightly or make hastily. We have seen first-hand how enterprises are benefiting from Elasticsearch in production environments during an extensive early access program, and are now very excited to launch the general availability of Instaclustr Managed Elasticsearch.”
— Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer, Instaclustr
About Instaclustr
At the time of this announcement, Instaclustr reported managing more than 50 million node hours and 5 PB of data across its open source technology suite, which includes Apache Cassandra®, Apache Kafka®, Apache Spark™, and Elasticsearch. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California.
Further Reading
For background on Open Distro for Elasticsearch, see the Open Distro for Elasticsearch project page (note: the project has since been superseded by OpenSearch, which AWS launched in 2021 as a fully open source fork following Elastic’s license change).