Thoughts on the Elastic stack? I.e. if you have used it and regretted it, please share your horror stories. Or, if you feel that it's great, share why that's the case or how did it help your company/business/product/whatever.

I went with simpler stack PLG. (Prometheus + Loki + Grafana)
Easy to use, minimalistic, high k8s support.
Loki logging is more efficient to store data due to it not having some stuff that elastic has

Obvious plus.
Full solution for monitoring and logging.

As always - for what?

It has grown quite a lot the last years - ES 1.7 to 5 was (nicely worded) piece of alpha crap, 6 was beta, 7 was release candidate and maybe 8 will be stable.

I really dislike the intransparency of Elastic - no one really knows what's going on and what will happen. Things like the disruptive change to only allow specific clients earned a lot of mistrust...

I haven't looked at Amazon's fork lately and if they kept their oath to be more open source / transparent.

Horror Stories?

TLDR: Be prepared to invest a lot of research to have a deep understanding of the node / voting system, JAVA, networking, Lucene internals, ...

If you really wanna go big, this is a must.

Longer story:
Don't go blindly in and try to "hot glue together" shit, don't follow craptastic advices on clickbait shit sites like Medium / ShitOverflow.

Learn how the internals works and have a lot of duct tape ready for programmers who try to explain you "this is how it works" - especially when they want to change the default configuration out of the tamper tantrum that they cannot work properly with the defaults of elastic.

Elastic at large requires careful planning of workflows to assure that the inverted index gets properly used (e.g. soft deletes, size of shards, search behaviour) and that the system itself doesn't drown (e.g. proper scaling of data vs search nodes, proper usage of the REST interfaces with load balancing, ....).

Stick to the defaults and examine carefully deprecations if you want to have an sane upgrade path - otherwise you're soon stuck with an outdated version of ES that is broken beyond repair.

@IntrusionCM

Truth is I haven't even used the Elastic stack that much before. I wanted to ask around to see what other developers are thinking about it because I'm considering to "begin considering" it as an advanced search solution for small to mid-size e-commerce projects.

@darkwind "Your data is worth only as much as the information it gives you when you look at it"

PLG stack throws away the ability to do fuzzy searching on labels, to dynamically filter dashboard data, to enrich stored data by e.g. parsing user agent strings or geolocating IPs, to quickly query or aggregate any data from logs, and all that just to save some storage. Which is the dumbest trade-off possible, since SSDs cost less than $0.1 per GB, meaning you're only saving something like $5 per 10^9 log entries by storing them in Loki vs Elastic. Sure, if you're just storing insane amounts of data that might be preferred, but as soon as you're trying to do some meaningful research on your data (e.g. to determine the impact of a bug), having the whole power of Elastic is worth way more than a couple $ you saved on storage.