Table of Contents
What is AWS CloudSearch and Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is an open-source, scalable, distributed search and analysis engine based on Lucene. It provides flexible Query and Facet Specification Language that is highly expressive and powerful.
CloudSearch is an AWS service that provides hosted search capabilities with a managed and scalable search index. It indexes objects from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets and allows for easy previews of contents.
CloudSearch vs Elasticsearch: Elasticsearch can be deployed on-premise, while CloudSearch is a hosted solution. CloudSearch utilizes the same traditional SQL query language as many relational databases, while Elasticsearch supports the Apache Lucene boolean syntax. For example, instead of requiring a WHERE clause to specify a search condition, Elasticsearch allows the specification of terms and conditions in a notation similar to regular expressions.
The AWS CloudSearch service enables you to easily index and search data stored in Amazon S3 buckets. You can use CloudSearch to perform full-text searches over any indexed data. You can define fixed fields, like title and subject, to index along with user-defined fields. You can also define a custom relevance model to automatically rank results.
How do they compare
AWS CLOUDSEARCH offers a lot more features however at the end of the day you will have to pay $300,000+ to get it done. Elasticsearch is much more flexible and easier to set up compared to AWS CLOUDSEARCH and it’s MUCH cheaper than AWS CLOUDSEARCH. (Elasticsearch is free)
Some of the inherent differences between AWS CLOUDSEARCH and ELASTICSEARCH are:
How Elasticsearch Works : Elasticsearch is a RESTful search engine that uses Lucene under the covers. Elasticsearch also has a higher level of abstraction than Lucene or Solr. It exposes APIs that allow you to build applications that can search, analyze, and visualize data. It has support for multiple programming languages.
How AWS Cloudsearch Works : AWS Cloud Search is based on Amazon CloudSearch (which is based on Apache Solr), which is a highly scalable search solution that uses a distributed architecture to simultaneously handle large amounts of search traffic.
Features of Elasticsearch :
1) Inbuilt analytics
Which one should you use for your business
AWS CLOUDSEARCH will be better for a business that needs large quantities of data to mine every hour. Elasticsearch is better for businesses that want to track their products, and get the most out of the data they already have. For example, if you have an online business like Amazon.com, which is growing rapidly and constantly changing your information will be used every minute. Elasticsearch is ideal to track this data because it’s fast and flexible, so it will not affect your performance as much as other databases. Amazon.com is one of the biggest online stores in the world, and it’s important for them to get their data as quickly as possible.
Elasticsearch is a database that stores and indexes information quickly and efficiently, so it does not affect your business performance too much. Elasticsearch also offers flexibility for you to organize the data however you want, so it will be easier for you to understand your information better.
You can create a searchable index that’s 100 times faster than standard databases. It allows you to store large amounts of data in the smallest package. Elasticsearch is especially efficient when it comes to searching through information, and it can provide you with information that you need.
Pros and cons of each option
AWS CLOUDSEARCH is easy to set up and provides a lot of features however it is expensive. Elasticsearch is more flexible, faster and cheaper than AWS CLOUDSEARCH. Elasticsearch is ideal for a business that needs to track products and data, or needs to store a large amount of data. Elasticsearch can be set up in around 15 minutes for free.
1. AWS CLOUDSEARCH/ ELASTICSEARCH
AWS CLOUDSEARCH is a cloud based search solution. It is commonly used for retrieving products, customers and other data. It can handle almost unlimited amount of data and minimises the chance of downtime when compared to Elasticsearch. There is a list of features that make this search solution prominent such as:
· Creates a powerful index quickly by not storing duplicate copies of documents, it uses primary key instead to identify each document.
· Both, Elasticsearch and AWS CLOUDSEARCH store data as documents not in relational structure.
· Replication is unlimited, it can extend and run on multiple nodes.
· It uses the Lucene library to search.
