Ever since the day Bonsai launched the world’s first Elasticsearch-as-a-Service cluster on demand, we always maintained a free tier of service. This tier has always been provisioned on 3 nodes, across multiple AZs, with access control and SSL baked right in. These clusters were sized to allow users the ability to explore and experiment with Elasticsearch, and determine whether a paid Bonsai subscription was a good fit.Since those days, much changed, but our commitment to maintaining a low barrier to entry never wavered. One of the biggest changes came several years ago, when all Bonsai clusters (even the freebies) shipped with a free Kibana instance for data analysis and exploration.Later versions of Kibana introduced the ability for users to load and analyze sample data. That in itself is great, but the problem was that the sample data exceeded the limits of the free plan. This meant that when users would create their free cluster and begin to explore all the cool things they could do, they would sometimes load some Kibana sample data, and immediately be notified of an overage.This was irritating for obvious reasons. Several workarounds address the issue, but it still made for a frustrating customer experience. So, we decided to fix it once and for all…
We officially raised the limits for free clusters across our entire platform! Whether you subscribe to Bonsai directly, or through Heroku, you now have all the documents and shards needed to load all the sample data from Kibana, with plenty of room left over. And it’s still 100% free!So get out there and get searching. And if you’d like to show us some love, let us know on Twitter at @bonsaisearch.
