Indeed, there is a lot of room to improve. I managed a cluster that grew from 9 to 40 then to 60 EC2 Servers over 2 years, with all updates and support we could afford. It was a a nightmare to manage. The amount of cluster rebalancing, magic nodes that claim to be leader and then do not behave like it is amazing. I don't want ever to get back managing it again. Last thing I did (ES7 at the time) was to split the cluster in many smaller clusters, reimplement all counters on relational databases and use as little of ES as possible. As a former colleague used to say: Elasticsearch is MongoDB for people ashamed of using MongoDB. Hope AWS and Elastic tension helps them to do a better job there.