How it works…

Elasticsearch Cloud Enterprise allows you to manage a large Elasticsearch cloud service that can create an instance via deployments. By default, the standard deployment will fire an ElasticSearch node with 4 GB RAM, 32 GB disk, and a Kibana instance.

You can define a lot of parameters during the deployments for ElasticSearch, such as the following:

The RAM used for instances from 1 GB to 64 GB. The storage is proportional to the memory, so you can go from 1 GB RAM and 128 GB storage to 64 GB RAM and 2 TB storage.
If the node requires ML.
Master configurations if you have more than six data nodes.
The plugins that are required to be installed.

For Kibana, you can only configure the memory (from 1 GB to 8 GB) and pass extra parameters (usually used for custom maps).

ECE does all the provisioning and, if you want a monitoring component and other X-Pack features, it's able to autoconfigure your cluster to manage all the required functionalities.

Elasticsearch Cloud Enterprise is very useful if you need to manage several Elasticsearch/Kibana clusters, because it leverages all the infrastructure problems.

A benefit of using a deployed Elasticsearch cluster is that, during deployment, a proxy is installed. This is very handy for managing the debugging of Elasticsearch calls.