As your Elastic usage increases and your use cases expand, it's important to know the benefits and cost savings that you can achieve by running Elasticsearch as a service. But since every Elasticsearch implementation can vary by use case and deployment model, it can be complicated to tackle on your own. So with that in mind, we are excited to share the Elastic Cloud Value Calculator. With this calculator, you can easily estimate cost savings and increases in productivity based on infrastructure needs, efficiency factors, potential risks, and more. Then, based on your results, you'll know how Elastic Cloud creates potential efficiencies for you, or help you determine if you're already on the right track. The calculator just does the hard part of handling the variables of your specific situation. One point before we get into the details. In developing this tool we have partnered with DecisionLink, who has many years of experience in developing web calculators and value models. We are grateful for their expertise in defining the assumptions with us below. Let's take a look at the logic and assumptions built into this tool. On to the math! Reduce IT infrastructure and storage costsCost savings usually start here, as it’s quite frequently the biggest bucket of potential value. Some of the factors the calculator takes into account are:

What instance types (and their respective costs) are you running Elastic on?
What do those instances cost annually?
If you aren't on Elastic Cloud, are you using reserve or on-demand pricing?
If you're running Elasticsearch in your own data center, what is the three-year amortized value of the hardware?

The first situation we filter for is whether you are running Elastic in your own data center or running it self-managed on a cloud provider. Each situation has its own infrastructure cost implications, which we break down below. Self-hosted in your own data center Reduce self-hosted server costs:

of nodes annual cost per server (server purchase / 3 years)  100% reduction of future server cost

Note: For self-hosted servers, we assume a 1:1 ratio of server to node. If you are using larger machines that can handle multiple nodes, you’ll need to divide the annual cost of a server by the number of nodes you are running on each server in order to get the appropriate cost comparison. Reduce server maintenance cost:

# of nodes * 
20% of annual server cost for maintenance & support * 
100% reduction of future server maintenance cost

Note: Maintenance of a server depends largely on the type of server and how old it is. Newer servers generally require less maintenance and support vs older ones (3+ years). Reduce data center overhead cost (heating, cooling, electric):

# of nodes * 25% of annual server cost for infrastructure overhead * 100% reduction of future server maintenance cost

For an overview of power usage associated with servers see this ZD net article on the topic. Self-hosted on another cloud providerReduce cost of cloud services:

# of nodes * annual cost per cloud virtual machine * 100% reduction of future cloud virtual machine cost

Reduce cost of data transfer and storage (DTS):

# of nodes * 20% of annual cloud virtual machine cost DTS * 100% reduction of DTS cost

General benefits applied in both situationsReduce software licensing costs:

# of nodes * 10% annual cost per server or cloud virtual machine * 100% reduction of future server license costNote: Assumptions here depend on whether you are using open source Linux, a RedHat distribution of the same, or something else for your server OS. Also, please keep in mind that this will be much higher if you are already paying for an Elastic licensed tier of software (Gold, Platinum, Enterprise) so you will need to take that into account and increase this amount if you are comparing self-managed to Elastic Cloud.

Reduce overprovisioning cost of hardwareWe run into overprovisioned hardware on a regular basis. Whether you overestimated or are just planning for worst-case scenarios, Elastic Cloud can help you get your sizing right, regardless of the risks you need to mitigate. In addition, we just launched a new autoscaling capability that will remove the need for you to ever have to worry about rightsizing your Elastic environment again when you use Elastic Cloud. Reduce overprovisioning cost of hardware:

# of nodes * annual cost per server or cloud virtual machine * 22.5% reduction of future overprovisioning costsNote: We see ranges of overprovisioning usually between 15-30% of the total infrastructure required.

Reduce unnecessary data duplication costFor the large community out there who are running Elastic self-managed on our free and open or Basic tiers, many will twist their deployment in order to reduce risk of exposure of data to the wrong audience. Often, the logical way to do this is to duplicate a portion of the data in your current Elastic cluster and put that portion of data in a new, isolated cluster for a specific audience. However, this effort can be reduced or eliminated by taking advantage of security and access controls, easily configured with Elastic Cloud. Reduce data duplication cost with access controls:

[# of nodes * % of nodes duplicated (30% assumed without access controls)] * annual duplication cost per node (both infra and human capital costs) * 30% reduction of future duplication costsNote: We assume only 30% reduction in cost here in order to be conservative and to take into account the probability of this happening in all situations. If this is occurring in your situation, you should consider this improvement factor to be 100%.

Subscription-level featuresLastly, there are powerful features in our Enterprise tier that you only have access to as an Elastic customer, such as searchable snapshots and data tiers. The cold data tier enables you to run a single node of Elastic with the replica stored in durable object storage (Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage) to reduce replication cost. So you can still search the cold node, with snappy responsiveness, but with the backup being an ultra low-cost alternative. And that’s just the beginning. We’re currently working on a searchable frozen tier that sits entirely within object storage with an even more compelling cost profile. Reduce hardware cost with data tiering (not applied within model, but worth considering):

# of nodes in warm data tier (assumes 50% of total nodes) * annual cost per server or cloud virtual machine * 50% reduction of future infrastructure costs through use of data tiers

IT efficiencyRunning and administering the Elastic Stack can take time and personnel. Deployments often start small, with little administrative overhead. But as adoption increases, so does the implementation size, and so do the demands (and expectations) of your users. We are always working to make the administration easier from within Kibana, but there is a lot to keep in mind: shards, replicas, scaling, upgrading, security, compliance, capacity, and more. These are things that aren't necessarily considered the first time a cluster is spun up. Generally speaking, a 25-node cluster of Elastic for logging or observability will require about 50% of a person’s time to manage and orchestrate, based on anecdotal evidence and discussions with the many folks here at Elastic who have done the work. So to apply some logic to that, if 50 nodes = 1 DevOps full-time employee (FTE), then 1 node = 0.02 FTEs. But with Elastic Cloud, we frequently see 70% of that operational overhead removed from our administrators’ daily lives. Now you only need to take up a smaller fraction of someone's time per node, as Elastic Cloud takes care of many of the details. The ratio becomes 200 nodes to 1 FTE. If you want a better view into how we can divide and conquer the work together, have a look through our responsibility matrix. The main responsibilities Elastic Cloud helps to make much easier include:

Reducing overall DevOps automation required through predefined APIs and protocols. This broader category accounts for the lion’s share of the automation benefits to administrative teams.
Reduce IT staff through Elastic Cloud orchestration:
# of FTEs for running Elastic self managed on a node basis * $100,000 FTE * 70% reduction in FTE time required to manage Elastic

Reducing time to manage upgrades by 95%.
Reduce time to manage upgrades:
Number of upgrades per year (assume 2X as a starting point) * $3,200 per upgrade (64 hours) * 95% reduction in time for managing upgrades

Reducing risk of managing critical vulnerability incidents and associated costs to near zero.
Reduce risk of critical vulnerability incidents:
# of critical vulnerabilities per year (assumes 4) * $4,000 per critical vulnerability engineering time (80 hours) * 10% reduction in critical vulnerability incidents

Revenue and employee disruption riskThis value category is potentially the largest, depending on your situation. Let’s talk about what it means to your business to run a highly stable, scalable, and resilient service with Elastic central to your architecture. Employee disruption risk reductionThis is the most common and important area of downstream user risk reduction. There are two big questions you need to consider here:

How many people at your company are using Elastic today (in some form) based on your implementation?
What is the cost of employees not having access to your Elastic implementation?

If it’s a security- or observability-related application, this could mean that your end users lack support when there is an urgent security or downtime risk-related incident that needs to be addressed. Ask yourself:

What is the cost per minute of disruption and downtime?
Will a single failure cause a domino effect of failures?
If there's an outage, will the observability solution also fail?

And maybe most importantly: How forgiving will stakeholders be when preventable infrastructure issues cause business outages? Improve end-user productivity through reduced risk of disruptions:

# of employee end users of the solution * $100,000 per FTE * 1% improvement in end