This all changed in February 2021 when Elastic B.V., the company backing the open source project, relicensed Elasticsearch and Kibana to a non-OSS dual license: SSPL and Elastic License. Both of these licenses are not approved by Open Source Initiative (OSI), the body authorizing OSS licensing. This puts in question the above benefits of running open source, especially the ability to freely reuse, modify, and adapt the open source to your needs. Furthermore, doing so may expose you to legal risks and may even mandate you to publicly release parts of your own application code under SSPL (which is a copyleft licence).
It Comes Down to Resources
You’ve heard of Netflix, Facebook, and LinkedIn, right? They are all running their own ELK stacks, as are thousands of other very successful companies. So, running ELK on your own is definitely possible. But, as outlined here, it all boils down to the number of resources at your disposal in terms of time and money. These companies have the resources to dedicate large teams to manage ELK. Do you?
Also take into consideration that the main pain points highlighted here are only the tip of the iceberg. There are a long list of features that are missing in the open source stack, but are recommended for production-grade deployments, including: user control and user authentication, alerting, and built-in Kibana visualizations and dashboards.
The overall cost of running your own deployment combined with the missing enterprise-grade features that are necessary for any modern centralized log management system makes a convincing case for choosing a cloud-hosted ELK platform. Or do you think you can pull it off yourself?