Amazon CloudSearch is a managed search service built on Amazon Web Services. It allows businesses to add search functionality to websites and applications without setting up or maintaining their own search infrastructure. Readers unfamiliar with the underlying technology can begin with our guide to the fundamentals and service models of cloud computing.
This article is part of our Cloud Computing Fundamentals resource section.
Table of Contents
Benefits
With Amazon CloudSearch, you can instantly add extensive search capabilities to your website or app. You don’t need to become a search expert or worry about sourcing, configuring, and also maintaining hardware. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can easily create a search domain and load the data you want to include in searches. Amazon CloudSearch will automatically provision the necessary resources and implement a finely tuned search index.
Services such as CloudSearch reflect how far cloud technology has progressed beyond basic online storage and virtual servers. The history and evolution of cloud computing explains how decades of developments in networking, virtualization and distributed infrastructure led to specialized managed services like this one.
You can easily modify search settings, adjust search relevance, and apply new settings at any time. If the volume of data and traffic fluctuates, it scales the service without interruptions to meet your needs.
Simplicity
You can configure and manage an Amazon CloudSearch domain using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, and also the AWS SDK. Just point to a sample of your data, and it will automatically recommend how you can configure your domain indexing options. You can easily add or remove index fields and customize search options like faceting and highlighting. You do not need to reload the data to change the settings.
Scalability
Amazon CloudSearch offers extreme automatic scaling of all search domains. As your data or query volume changes, it can increase or decrease the resources of your search domain as needed. You can control scaling if you know in advance that you will need more capacity for bulk uploads or if you anticipate an increase in search traffic.
Automatic scaling is one of the features that makes cloud-based search suitable for websites with changing traffic and data volumes. Other developments, including containers, serverless services and AI-ready infrastructure, are covered in our overview of current cloud computing trends.
Reliability
[Amazon CloudSearch] offers automatic monitoring and recovery features for your search domains. When the Multi-AZ option is enabled, it supplies and maintains resources for a search domain in two Availability Zones to ensure high availability. Therefore, updates are automatically applied to search instances in both Availability Zones. Search traffic gets distributed across the two Availability Zones, and models in either zone can handle the entire load in the event of an error.
High performance
Amazon CloudSearch ensures low latency and high performance, also on a large scale, through automatic fragmentation and automatic horizontal and vertical scaling.
Fully managed
Amazon Cloud Search is a fully managed, personalized search service. We take care of hardware and software provisioning, installation and configuration, application of software patches, data partitioning, node monitoring, data scaling, and also durability.
Organizations can use CloudSearch entirely within AWS or connect it to applications and data maintained elsewhere. In a hybrid cloud architecture, for example, a business could retain sensitive information in a private environment while using a managed public-cloud service to provide scalable search capabilities.
Wide variety of search features
Amazon CloudSearch supports powerful search features such as the following:
- Firstly, it has free text, boolean and faceted searches
- Secondly, it has autocomplete tips
- Customizable importance ranking and query time ranking expressions
- Field weighting
- Geospatial search
- Highlighted
- Support for 34 languages
Cost-effectiveness
Amazon Cloud Search design works to deliver profitability. You will pay reduced hourly rates but, only for the resources, you use. Amazon Cloud Search offers a low total cost of ownership for your search applications compared to running a proprietary search environment. For detailed pricing information, see Pricing.
Security
In addition, Amazon Cloud Search uses strong cryptographic methods to authenticate users and prevent unauthorized access to domains. Amazon Cloud Search supports HTTPS and integrates with Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to CloudSearch’s configuration service and document, search, and also suggestion services for each domain.
