This article, originally detailing the management of Elasticsearch clusters through a service previously known as Found (now Elastic Cloud), outlines the process of creating, upgrading, and maintaining high-availability clusters tailored for various needs, from testing to critical production environments. It explains the steps involved in setting up a cluster, including selecting a region, capacity, availability, Elasticsearch version, and plugins, all of which can be adjusted without downtime. The article also covers significant considerations, such as memory allocation and high availability through multiple availability zones to ensure reliability. It highlights the ease of changing configurations and performing upgrades, with a particular focus on the challenges of major version upgrades, recommending a strategy involving a new cluster setup and reindexing. The piece stresses the importance of access control to secure clusters and provides insights into log management and potential API automation for testing. Additionally, it touches on the benefits and potential pitfalls of using Elasticsearch as a NoSQL database, advocating for a deeper understanding of its internal structures to maximize its utility.