elssar

Thats why I said, "in terms of AWS costs".

I've been managing out elasticsearch cluster for the past year and a bit. It grew from a single node that also ran kibana, logstash, and nginx, and stored our mysql backups to 9 data nodes, 1 client node, and a dedicated master. I have faced issues, but never had to rebuild the cluster. For the most part, reading up on the ES docs, and making a config change fixed the issue. Sometimes I've had to restart a node, but thats rare.

In terms of AWS costs, running your own cluster will cost significantly less, specially if you use reserved instances. The AWS ES instances cost ~1.6x more than their regular counterparts. Also, you can't reserve ES instances.

At a previous company, we had a culture of sending out prank emails from open machines.

I once sent out an email from a co-founders account which said that he was fed up with the crappy codebase and was hiring a new team to rewrite it from scratch and that the other (non-tech) co-founder was to take over the existing tech team. No one took it seriously (non-tech co-founder helped me draft the email, the other one laughed while reading it after the fact), but there was a board member in the mailing group who thought it was serious and started sending panicky emails to the co-founders.

I'd go to the bookstore and leaf through a few popular science books and get the ones that I liked the most.

Other than that, there are a lot of TV series and youtube videos/channels that do an excellent job of explaining science and maths. Dr Brian Cox does a brilliant job in his Wonders of the Universe,and Wonders of the Solar System series.

> call people and ask

I'd rather get emails -_-

> my family would need to make some pretty big lifestyle changes

That is something I don't have to consider. That makes the decision harder. I know someone who chose to work on his own startup in India, over moving to Mountain View, because he didn't want to move his family there.

Like I said, I'd go if I were in the OPs position. Didn't give any other advice :)