Resilience in Elastic Cloud Serverless

In Elastic Cloud Serverless, Elastic manages all infrastructure resilience automatically. Unlike Elastic Cloud Hosted or self-managed deployments, there are no nodes to configure, no replica counts to tune, and no availability zone settings to manage. Resilience is built into the platform at the infrastructure level.

Serverless uses a stateless storage architecture in which indexed data is written to cloud-provider object storage rather than stored as local replicas on cluster nodes. This provides extreme data durability:

• Object storage is replicated across multiple physical locations within a region by the underlying cloud provider, independently of compute node health.
• Data durability does not depend on in-cluster shard replication. A node failure has no impact on data that has already been written — the data exists independently of the compute layer.
• Elastic automatically retains recovery data for each project to support emergency data recovery scenarios.

To learn more about the stateless architecture underpinning Serverless, refer to Elastic's serverless architecture.

The stateless architecture introduces a higher baseline write latency compared to Elastic Cloud Hosted, as writes are batched before being committed to object storage. Refer to Compare Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless for details on write performance characteristics.

Serverless automatically distributes compute resources across multiple availability zones within a region. No configuration is required:

• Query and indexing traffic is served from multiple zones simultaneously.
• If a zone becomes unavailable, traffic is automatically shifted to the remaining zones with no action required from you.

Elastic maintains a service level agreement (SLA) for Serverless project availability. Refer to the Elastic Cloud Serverless Service Level Agreement for details.

Elastic retains recovery data for each Serverless project. In the event of data loss caused by an infrastructure failure, Elastic can use this to restore your project to a previous state.

Serverless does not currently offer a self-service recovery workflow for data loss resulting from user-initiated operations, such as accidental index deletion or bulk document removal. If you experience this type of data loss, contact Elastic Support to discuss your options.

All resilience in Serverless is regional. Projects run in a single cloud region, and there is no built-in support for multi-region architectures:

• Cross-region replication is not available.
• There is no automatic failover to an alternative region if the region itself becomes unavailable.

If your requirements include multi-region resilience, you can deploy separate projects in different regions and manage data routing or synchronization at the application level. Refer to available Serverless regions for the supported options.