It is not necessary to have a valid alternative to validly declare something as fundamentally flawed.
ElasticSearch is as brittle as you can get. If you don't dimension Java heap sizes properly, nodes crash all the time and uncontrollable ultra-expensive shard relocation happens. Their open source available monitoring tools have the nice side effect of overloading the cluster and bringing it down (!). The result of it being a whole hodgepodge of Java-based repurposed Lucene does show in poor performance and very poor stability.
I've spent many a weekend trying to bring up a fallen ElasticSearch cluster, in some cases brought down just from monitoring. We had a use case that wasn't that easy, but not massive (100ks concurrent users, but not concurrent millions), and a properly developed C++ or even Python distributed solution would be more than able to handle it quite easily (source: ended up having to write it myself, didn't require massive anything to handle properly).
Frankly I admire Elastic because I have no idea how you can turn such a piece of software into ~$90MM yearly revenues, and, mainly, how you can turn that ~$90MM yearly revenue into a publicly traded company with a nearly $7bn market cap. So much to learn from them!
ElasticSearch is as brittle as you can get. If you don't dimension Java heap sizes properly, nodes crash all the time and uncontrollable ultra-expensive shard relocation happens. Their open source available monitoring tools have the nice side effect of overloading the cluster and bringing it down (!). The result of it being a whole hodgepodge of Java-based repurposed Lucene does show in poor performance and very poor stability.
I've spent many a weekend trying to bring up a fallen ElasticSearch cluster, in some cases brought down just from monitoring. We had a use case that wasn't that easy, but not massive (100ks concurrent users, but not concurrent millions), and a properly developed C++ or even Python distributed solution would be more than able to handle it quite easily (source: ended up having to write it myself, didn't require massive anything to handle properly).
Frankly I admire Elastic because I have no idea how you can turn such a piece of software into ~$90MM yearly revenues, and, mainly, how you can turn that ~$90MM yearly revenue into a publicly traded company with a nearly $7bn market cap. So much to learn from them!