Deployment comparison reference
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 Differences from other Elasticsearch offerings > Feature availability .
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