In my consulting I switched from rolling out ElasticSearch on Azure, AWS or on-prem to Algolia and couldn't be happier. I want to scope and build products and not be a sysadmin - clients don't want to do any of it, let alone hiring fulltime sysadmins.

I have one client in particular that is a stark indicator of this trend - 50+ year old company and their second floor where they used to have 30+ developers and sysadmins and a server room downstairs has now been remodelled into a break room and new offices for their new team of 5 (all awesome replacing a ton of mediocre people who didn't get much done for a decade)

They're doing better, their products are more popular, they don't have to worry about recruiting developers + sysadmins, their current IT staff get paid better and they're saving money.

I find Algolia interesting in that they've managed to capture something that Elasitc didn't - and it could be because of a prevailing wisdom similar to that of grandfather's comment