Nice. This looks promising. Very clean API. I like the focus on a narrow use case.
Do you have any information on security topics like using TLS, client authentication, etc?
MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
31–40 of 116 posts
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The practice itself is malignant, either explicitly ask upon first run or require a MEILI_YES_ANALYTICS env variable to enable it.
That would require configuration. This is zero-config.
It'd still be zero-config to provide it's primary function. I don't think anyone would say anything against MeiliSearch or not consider it zero-config had they decided to enable analytics off an env var rather than having analytics be sent by default.
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#33Is there already a browser library that can talk to MeiliSearch?
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#34I know the project doesn't claim it, but the title somewhat implies this: I honestly don't understand people claiming ElasticSearch is hard to operate, especially not at small scales. If anything, ElasticSearch for me has been one of the easiest pieces of infrastructure to operate, for me pretty much "zero-config". Let me elaborate: You can run ElasticSearch via Docker command-line, if you want a cluster you just sup…
> I honestly don't understand people claiming ElasticSearch is hard to operate, especially not at small scales.
The problem is that ES is deceptively simple to operate. As millions of people who have found things like their medical records shared with the world can attest.
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#35MeiliSearch appears to be more of an alternative to Lucene than it is to Elasticsearch. Lucene is the search engine that runs on a single instance; ES is the horizontally-scalable distribution and aggregation layer atop the instances. Absent a similar aggregation layer, MeiliSearch isn't "elastic" as the comparison implies.
You might be thinking of Solr. Which is the server developed by the Lucene team. Lucene is used in most full-text search systems written in Java.
Also for bonus points there is a distributed version of Solr called Solr Cloud.
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#36Is there already a browser library that can talk to MeiliSearch?
Yes, there is, you can find all clients on this documentation page: https://docs.meilisearch.com/resources/sdks.html
Note that we are reworking the js library and there will probably be React integration too!
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#37Nice. This looks promising. Very clean API. I like the focus on a narrow use case. Do you have any information on security topics like using TLS, client authentication, etc?
Currently we think this kind of security can be enabled by a simple nginx setup, allowing autorefesh of certificates easily (e.g. certbot). But in the future we will probably handle that in the engine itself.
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#38I know the project doesn't claim it, but the title somewhat implies this: I honestly don't understand people claiming ElasticSearch is hard to operate, especially not at small scales. If anything, ElasticSearch for me has been one of the easiest pieces of infrastructure to operate, for me pretty much "zero-config". Let me elaborate: You can run ElasticSearch via Docker command-line, if you want a cluster you just sup…
Elasticsearch is easier than mongo in some ways and harder in others.
I run a few 10TiB ES clusters (which, is not much to be fair) but infrequently find that I have to reindex or reshard the cluster because I can’t just add another node. There’s something to be said for understanding the index rotation too, and access patterns.
It’s easy to make an ES cluster, it’s difficult to maintain one, it’s nearly impossible to debug one.
- if you consider that “it’s slow” is what you have to debug.
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it just replication (can sustain node failures) or also sharding the data?
We are working on both replication (for high availability and we may use the Raft consensus) and distribution (sharding to scale horizontally and keeping low latency)
Is there a point of contact for this work? A GitHub issue open? This is an area I'd be interested in.
Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust
#40I know the project doesn't claim it, but the title somewhat implies this: I honestly don't understand people claiming ElasticSearch is hard to operate, especially not at small scales. If anything, ElasticSearch for me has been one of the easiest pieces of infrastructure to operate, for me pretty much "zero-config". Let me elaborate: You can run ElasticSearch via Docker command-line, if you want a cluster you just sup…
I've been bitten by elasticsearch twice in my career, and I've seen others bitten by it as well. Once you put it in production, you can't just run it from docker on your workstation. You have to set up a cluster with enough capacity for whatever load you're going to throw at it, gracefully handle failures, updates, scaling up as load increases, etc.
There are so many switches and dials to tune, and unless you really learn it in depth, you won't know which ones you need. It's difficult to even determine what hardware requirements you have. And it's a hard sell to tell your business guys "I think elasticsearch will work better if we give it more... CPU? Memory? Disk speed? I'm not really sure." and can't provide any concrete metrics to back that up.
Another place where footguns abound is upgrading from one version to another, especially if you've got plugins installed. There are tricks that you have to learn the hard way.
At this point, I think long and hard before reaching for a solution like elasticsearch. If I've got a DBA whose entire job it is to master the tech and wield it expertly, that's one thing. But if I'm part of an early stage startup, I just can't justify the lost time and potential for catastrophe.