Differences from other Elasticsearch offerings

Index lifecycle management (ILM) is not available, in favor of data stream lifecycle.

In an Elastic Cloud Hosted or self-managed environment, ILM lets you automatically transition indices through data tiers according to your performance needs and retention requirements. This allows you to balance hardware costs with performance. Serverless Elasticsearch eliminates this complexity by optimizing your cluster performance for you.

Data stream lifecycle is an optimized lifecycle tool that lets you focus on the most common lifecycle management needs, without unnecessary hardware-centric concepts like data tiers.

Watcher is not available, in favor of Kibana Alerts.

Kibana Alerts allows rich integrations across use cases like APM, metrics, security, and uptime. Prepackaged rule types simplify setup and hide the details of complex, domain-specific detections, while providing a consistent interface across Kibana.

Certain APIs, API parameters, index, cluster and node level settings are not available. Refer to our REST API references for a list of available APIs.

Serverless Elasticsearch manages the underlying Elastic cluster for you, optimizing nodes, shards, and replicas for your use case. Because of this, various management and monitoring APIs, API parameters and settings are not available on Serverless.