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.
> 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.
That's quiet a high salary you currently get. Usually when foreign companies hire developers in India, they do it to reduce costs(for what you get, your company could easily hire 5 really good developers, or 10 good ones). I'm guessing that your company believes that compensation should be based on what they believe the developer is worth and what they are willing to pay, instead of where the developer lives.
$250k/year is probably twice the median salary for a developer in SF. Yes it's not quiet the same as it would be in India, but still is pretty good. I personally would take it, just because I feel it's a better place to live and work.
To put it into perspective, Google pays it's CFO a base salary of $650K a year. Of course there are bonuses, and stock options that make it much more than that, but I doubt you'll get anywhere close to what the converter says.
I second both Udacity, and applying to every job where the description seems to fit you.
I was in a similar situation just a week and a half ago - almost 25, took 6 years for a 4 year degree(something you can't do in India, looks really really bad on the resume) and had no experience other than a failed stint as a freelance web developer and a useless 3.5 month stint at a company where I did nothing.
So, till last Sunday, I had pretty much 0 value in the job market. I had a Github account and some small projects on it, but nothing more than decent and I kept thinking I'll apply for this awesome position when I finish that amazing project. And I would've kept doing that for a long long time, but there was a thing came up where I had to travel to another city and I figured since I was going there, might as well apply to a few positions in companies based there. So early Sunday morning(2am ish) I send out a bunch of applications. By Wednesday I had a new job with payed more than what most of the guys I went to college with earn(in some cases it might be as much as 2x), had a standing job offer from another place for when I leave the job I hadn't even started yet, one co-founder pushing me to come over for an interview and offered to better what ever I'd make at the other place, plus 3 other inquiries.
And all that with a few half decent projects on github and a passionate(I think so) about me thing on the resume.
Granted that there are a lot more better programmers available in the US than there are here in India(my boss was shocked by the level of most coders he interviewed), but still it seems doable - getting a job solely on coding chops.
I'm not saying that if you start applying you'll get a job the next day or even the next week or the next month. I'll be the first one to admit that I got really lucky with the timing(a lot of start ups had put up wanted posts at that time) and with the apparent lack to good programmers who want to work at start ups in India. But unless you apply, you don't find out whether or not you could've got that position you liked.
So code some stuff up, put it online and start applying.