I spent a couple of Summers in Yorktown Heights and even had lunch with Beniot a couple of times.
To have the second largest super computer down the hall, an electron tunneling microscope, and beauty of the Hudson Valley seems like a bygone era. The innovation, patents, and persona were not enough to move the needle vs Silicon Valley.
You can upgrade instantly on AWS, it doesn't take weeks. A lot of problems with AWS Elasticsearch Service are caused by corporations trying to squeeze a dollar out of a dime.
T2 and T3s with no Master Nodes, let alone three, leads to a lot of problems.
When everything lives in MMAP'd memory and you are nickel and dime'n it with 4GB and one CPU. You're going to have a bad day.