Amazon ES Service is a fully managed system that makes it easy to deploy Elastic Stack to AWS servers in an integrated way. Some features like installing Kibana plugins are not yet available. ElasticSearch is part of the Elastic Stack, a group of tools/services from the Elastic Company (elastic.co) Elastic Stack: * Kibana * ElasticSearch * Beats * Logstash ElasticSearch is a NoSQL document database and is most common used with Kibana , a UI tool to visualize data from the ES database. ElasticSearch is used for high speed text search. It was previously known as the ELK Stack because of the tools/services from Elastic Company that are used togheter: * ElasticSearch * Logstash * Kibana In elasticsearch db you post data to an index in the same way you insert data into tables in a RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems). We use index to separate and group different types of information (data) in the same way we use tables in a database. SO INDEXES ARE FOR ES