Is there a way to stop the AWS Elasticsearch?

Question

I setup an AWS Elasticsearch Domain recently but I didn't see a way to stop it (like you can with an EC2 instance), which means I'm continuously billed. At this stage I just need to do some testing and don't require a full-time cluster.

The only option I see is to delete the domain, am I missing something?

Solution 1

You will have to delete the cluster for billing to stop. However, if you want to backup the data for later experiments, you can take manual snapshots (link rotten, check archived page here) of the indices to your S3 buckets.

The next time you spawn a cluster, just restore the snapshot :)

Solution 2

There is no way to stop the cluster today. What I did to reduce my bill was that I edited the cluster to reduce the instance type to a t2.small instance which is significantly cheaper than the previous instance.

Then when I needed to resume testing I changed the instance type back to what I required.

Comments

[ceejayoz]

docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/developergu‌​ide/… states "delete the domain when you are finished experimenting with it or you might incur charges", which would seem to indicate deletion is required. I'm not aware of a way to stop AWS ElasticSearch temporarily.

[ipeacocks]

ES in AWS is probably shared instance. Thus, you can't just stop own one.

[Esben von Buchwald]

I also realized that - I deleted the ES domain manually in my test environment to save money. But I had a hard time deploying anything afterwards, as CloudFormation would not recreate it because of the mess I made by manually deleting it and not being able to redeploy all the lambda functions that depend on the ES domain. Any suggestions to fix that?

[hjpotter92]

@EsbenvonBuchwald haven't worked at all with cloudformation. sorry :(

[Alex B]

this is the best solution actually. I had read somewhere that I needed a t2.medium but I'm reducing the instance to the smallest (nano) and will take it from there.

[timhj]

@hjpotter92 - That link is dead, is it still possible to do manual snapshots of indicies and restore them?

[hjpotter92]

@timhj hmm, I can't find the link for older ES service on wayback anymore, but if you've moved to opensearch (which i haven't tried); the equivalent docs are here: docs.aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/latest/developerguide‌​/…

[hjpotter92]

@timhj nvm, updated the reply with archived link (web.archive.org/web/20170810131300/https://docs.aws.amazon.‌​com/…)

[timhj]

@hjpotter92 - thanks, the AWS link is perfect.