Security for Elasticsearch is now free

https://www.elastic.co/blog/security-for-elasticsearch-is-now-free?blade=tw&hulk=social

by jasondc • 7 years ago

108 61 7 years ago

mrkstu2• 7 years ago

Free, not open source version. Obviously a reaction to Amazon's fork- not wanting to give them any code to pull into their version.

It will be interesting to see if this is enough to retain the majority of the userbase or if we'll still see a majority migrate to the 'Open Distro' fork.

chelmzy• 7 years ago

I was under the impression that they already opened the code for X-Pack features.

lol7685• 7 years ago

Were these features licensed in such a way that you could freely use them, though? Or was it 'open' as in "you can see the code" but it's not FOSS?

Jedd• 7 years ago

Refer this thread from 2018-02 when the X-Pack licensing change was announced:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487440

Summary -- vague use of the word 'open' and exclusive use of free in the beer sense, led to some significant angst about what this means for end users.

jka• 7 years ago

Good catch and an important distinction.

Some background here:

https://devclass.com/2019/03/12/aws-launches-elasticsearch-d...

yehosef3• 7 years ago

The features of the open distro are not enough to compare to the Elastic offerings. I think most are smart enough to see through Amazon's "generosity" and know that they (Amazon) are not a bastion of OSS.

noname1202• 7 years ago

Could you expand on the features that Open Distro misses and that Elastic offers?

mrkstu2• 7 years ago

Also note that you'll want to go to the features page and hit the disclosure triangle on the 'Security' feature. This is very much a subset of their security features- no IP filtering, AD/LDAP integration, SAML or many other security oriented features.

https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions

lol7685• 7 years ago

I'm actually okay with these more enterprise features still being premium. Basic RBAC, TLS support and user management should've been core from the start for free, though.

dhd415• 7 years ago

To be fair, the Docker Hub stats for the Open Distro for ES image don't show a very large shift away the Elastic ES image. And I doubt Amazon really cares about that, either. This is about whether their hosted ES service remains competitive with Elastic's hosted ES service.

glloydell• 7 years ago

Totally agree. Amazon had to do something after Elastic changed their license terms specifically to stop Amazon from competing with their own hosted service.

I'm interested to see what Elastics next move will be.

grabs popcorn

jillesvangurp2• 7 years ago

Open distro is definitely creating some pressure on ES. However, there are some misconceptions on what that is.

1) Amazon did not actually fork elasticsearch or maintains any patches against it.

2) Elasticsearch does in fact provide completely OSS distributions and docker images for their products.

3) Amazon has created several OSS plugins for Elasticsearch that they bundle with their open distro that compete directly with what Elasticsearch does in their non OSS add-ons to their product.

So, obviously Elasticsearch is responding to Amazon by ensuring there's little functional gap with the stuff you get for free.

I'd argue most new users are still better off on elastic cloud vs amazon's hosted version of their distro and should not be attempting to run this themselves. I've used both and would pick elastic cloud every time for the simple reason of being more reliable and easy to deal with (e.g. backups, upgrades, cluster topology changes, etc.). Also, it seems they are quite competitive on price/performance.

For reference, we pay about 170 Euro a month for a simple setup that takes care of all our logging (couple of GB worth of logs / day). I'd hate running blind without that. IMHO at those prices, self hosting is not worth the effort (devops time required to do it would pay for several years of hosting).

jjeaff• 7 years ago

Regarding the docker images elastic provides, I find it odd that they are only hosted from their own servers (rather than docker hub) and I have looked all over the place to find the dockerfile they use to create those images.

It seems that they are hiding that info and it really locks you into only doing customizations that the docker image is directly built for.

I also don't like to pull images blindly. I generally fork the dockerfile source so that I can build the software from source and have a bit more control and knowledge of what I am installing.

pmart1232• 7 years ago

Do you have a good understanding of the legal differences? My understanding is there now an open source license that anyone can fork, including companies basically committing IP theft, and then a basic license that is free unless you are selling Elastic as a service? The idea is that Elastic would put all improvements into Elastic Basic, and Amazon can't use this source code in its forked version?

IMO, it doesn't seem like a near-term risk, but could Elastic ever change its basic license so it costs money for everyone?

KenanSulayman2• 7 years ago

Interesting. Three hours ago someone in our Ops team shared a link to "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" [1] and it's also featured on the AWS console login page.

Is this a very rushed reaction to it? Or is this related? I would really love to have a clarification of what's happening in that space.

[1] https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/

igama2• 7 years ago

Opendistro was announced by AWS a few weeks ago. It’s their fork of ES with security features and some of the XPack functionality included.

aasasd• 7 years ago

How were you able to miss all the drama about AWS and ElasticSearch / Mongo / Nginx here on HN?

It turned out that with the open core and premium-service models, the original company might not be the only one providing paid services or development. Which was a bit of a surprise to those original devs.

yehosef3• 7 years ago

see https://grafana.com/blog/2019/03/28/everything-you-need-to-k... and the first part of the story it links to.

syrrim• 7 years ago

opendistro has this:

https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/security

which has feature parity with the free version elastic just released afaict.

majkinetor2• 7 years ago

No it doesn't - for example LDAP/AD are paid feature in ES

vorpalhex3• 7 years ago

Too little too late? Trying to charge for TLS was a very poor move and it's made me not trust ElasticSearch...

nickserv2• 7 years ago

I can understand they need to make money, but still a bit shady. Honestly though it's not something critical for my needs. Now if they could lower the resource hogging a bit, that would interest me... Maybe even pay for that.

jrockway• 7 years ago

I use ELK for Kubernetes and network device logs, and I'm very much with you -- full text search is great, but it sure can be slow, even when running on $1000/month of AWS hardware.

The conclusion that I've reached is that the whole lucene model for logs is kind of outdated. Why am I tuning Java GC params to run "grep foo /logs". I think computers today can do fine with sharded flat files, a minimal index ("which node contains logs from pod foo-2387438-2384738 at 12:34AM"), and then just scale horizontally over (log messages, searches).

I hope my friends over at Tailscale are doing that and I can just move off ES entirely ;)

zaphirplane4• 7 years ago

Why don’t you want to pay for a feature that you need? The company that pays your wages makes money from selling something. Of course you sell what people need

ipsum2• 7 years ago

The company that pays your wages makes money from selling something.

They could be using Elasticsearch for a side project. IMO, open source projects should not be unsecured.

Azeralthefallen2• 7 years ago

The last time i talked to Elasticsearch about pricing, it was so extremely expensive for our use case to the point of it basically being a non valid option for us.

lol7685• 7 years ago

Why don’t you want to pay for a feature that you need?

It's irresponsible to charge for features such as transport security, in my opinion.

Want to charge for enterprise auditing, federation, reporting and granular access control? Fine, go right ahead. But withholding basic security features like transport security and basic access control that should be core leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

How many unsecured Elasticsearch servers have been popped, leading to data breaches as a direct result of this decision?

Dylan168073• 7 years ago

Security shouldn't be treated as a bonus feature.

Roles, okay. Not TLS.

Security should almost always be a baseline requirement before something goes up for public sale.

vorpalhex3• 7 years ago

Imagine if Facebook charged you $5 to reset your password.

TLS isn't like say, LDAP integration. One of those is a fancy enterprise feature you can totally charge for (and probably should), and one of those is a basic critical feature.

It would be unethical to charge $400/year to properly store user passwords as hashed instead of plaintext, wouldn't it?

mattmcknight• 7 years ago

It is too late. I've stuck with Solr and things are good.

haney• 7 years ago

I know it's hard to make a buck with an open source business model but deciding to charge more for security related features is always so frustrating to me. It leads to a culture of insecure deployments in environments when the business is trying to save money. Differentiate on storage or number of cores or something, anything but auth/security. I'm glad they've finally reversed this.

tedk-422• 7 years ago

Running Elasticsearch on K8s storing 16TB of compressed logs across 6 data nodes and ~4600 shards.

We're a really happy ES customer. We've on ESv6 at the moment and it's been running amazingly for us. We've halved our storage and running costs by moving from 5 to 6.

We've always been a licensed customer and they are in front of AWS with their features (we run our k8s stack on AWS though :) )

KenanSulayman2• 7 years ago

How did ES 6 reduce your operation costs by 50%? Same CPU, disk & network bandwidth?

praseodym• 7 years ago

Some free advice: reduce the number of shards! Each shard comes with some state management overhead.

The soft limit is currently at 1000 shards per node, but you should be aiming at 25-50GB of data per shard.

parliament32• 7 years ago

That's an insane number of shards, you should be closer to 500 for that amount of data and only 6 nodes.

tedk-422• 7 years ago

It's due to the number of indicies/indexes stored from our various data sources. Yours and another poster's comments are interesting so we might look at ways we can reduce the shard count given the new info on overhead.

mattupstate• 7 years ago

There's also a lesser known project out there: https://search-guard.com/

Paired with an OpenResty reverse proxy I was able to set up a reasonably secure cluster back when X-Pack was prohibitively expensive and the AWS offering wasn't under their BAA.

Big thanks to that team of contributors!

reilly3000• 7 years ago

Some of the worst breaches of 2017-19 have been due to open ES clusters, some on AWS. This is a welcome change. I just spun our AWS ES cluster down in favor of BigQuery, but while I was setting it up security for it was a big chore, with defaults that are in no way sane. AWS EC2 does a great job at secure defaults for auth and firewalls, RDS even moreso. Why was ES left to wag in the wind out of the box?

mrmondo• 7 years ago

This (while perhaps not perfect) is massive for us, it’s going to be especially useful for Kibana authentication to add readonly and write users, something we’ve wanted for a long time but haven’t been able to afford as a non-profit, charitable organisation.

I know it’s not all 100% open source, but it’s better than a nginx reverse proxy hack or similar.

Thank you Elastic for continuing to create fantastic software.

dadoonet• 7 years ago

Did you apply to this program? https://www.elastic.co/elastic-search-awards/ That could help your hopefully.

Security for Elasticsearch is now free

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