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Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

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Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#71

Post by nzadrozny »

diego wrote: post #65
staunch wrote: post #4

Feeling for the guys who started IndexTank replacements and other Search-aaS companies. Infrastructure is a poor place to be with AWS around. Just a matter of time until they offer every low level service.

They can have one advantage over AWS: customer service. That's what made IndexTank, we would have never made it as user-friendly without our close relationship with our users.

Absolutely agreed. My cofounder and I have real conversations with real websolr customers every day, who are thrilled to have access to search experts.

Not just customer service, too, but end to end developer experience can be a huge advantage. I'm personally very active in maintaining the popular Sunspot Ruby library for Solr, and have passing familiarity with the internals of half a dozen other clients as well. This makes for improvements at all levels of the stack.

While the CloudSearch API looks a bit more reasonable than the recently released DynamoDB, Amazon has traditionally been somewhat poor in terms of end-to-end developer experience.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#72

Post by cannuk »

diego wrote: post #65
staunch wrote: post #4

Feeling for the guys who started IndexTank replacements and other Search-aaS companies. Infrastructure is a poor place to be with AWS around. Just a matter of time until they offer every low level service.

They can have one advantage over AWS: customer service. That's what made IndexTank, we would have never made it as user-friendly without our close relationship with our users.

I can definitely attest to IndexTank's fantastic customer service making a difference. We used the service for our startup. I remember dealing with Ignacio. Not only did he take the time to help us when we were using the free service, he took the time to look at our site (and give us a much needed ego boost by calling it a good idea). He took the time to understand the idea and figure out just what we needed. That is not going to happen with AWS...

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#73

Post by matan_a »

It's nice to see Amazon entering this space as they do have the expertise to keep this up and running as well as provide the scale needed as apps grow.

What i always tho is the ability to run search queries that also involve dynamic grouping (like grouping by random combinations of facets) and providing those aggregated results.

Only thing i've seen that can do this "on the fly" is SenseiDB. CloudSearch/Solr/etc seem to need preprocessing to get this right.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#74

Post by hkarthik »

nzadrozny wrote: post #70
hkarthik wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solr or Sphinx based searching is what pushed me out of most of the PaaS offerings and into my own VPS. It's unfortunate that most of the hosted services out there are too expensive for side projects. When I looked at WebSolr, the cost exceeded my entire VPS structure, even for their cheapest plans.

We think our prices actually compare pretty well to self-hosting. Hosting a search engine is not cheap when it comes to memory and disk IO, and I don't envy anyone trying to shoehorn production Solr traffic into a small VPS. Not to mention, we've got transparent replicated redundancy on all our indexes—one of our better-kept secrets, I really need to update our marketing materials—so double your VPSs there.

After setting Solr up, I definitely see the value that you guys provide for high traffic sites. But there's a difference between production level needs and hobbyist level needs for a side projects.

For side projects I'd be okay with indexing being less aggressive, sizes being more restrictive, and response times being higher if that made the pricing more accessible.

I'd be happy to give you guys more money when I've got the traffic to justify it, but it'd be nice to be able to flip that on when I need it.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#75

Post by StavrosK »

nzadrozny wrote: post #69
johns wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also: Searchify, Running the full open sourced IndexTank Search as a Service API HoundSleuth, IndexTank Compatible API IndexTanktoGO, IndexTank Compatible API Bimaple, IndexTank Compatible API IndexDen, IndexTank Compatible API

You seem to like IndexTank ;) There's also my own http://websolr.com/ running Apache Solr. Some other Solr services are mentioned elsewhere on the page. I've also recently launched http://bonsai.io/ for a hosted ElasticSearch service. Because ElasticSearch is actually quite awesome (and I'm happy to answer questions about why). For Sphinx, there's Flying Sphinx (by Pat Allen of Thinking Sphinx Ruby client fame, great…

So, why is ElasticSearch awesome, apart from being a searchable document/JSON store? That's pretty obviously awesome :P

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#76

Post by StavrosK »

peyton wrote: post #57
aphexairlines wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon never claimed this.

Here's the initial announcement of EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2006/08/24/announc... > run on Amazon’s proven computing environment Yes, Amazon never explicitly stated, "We run our site on a fleet of EC2 instances, and you should too," but they certainly weaseled a connection with their main site that didn't exist.

This says that EC2 runs on Amazon, not the other way around.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#77

Post by cmiles74 »

PanMan wrote: post #63
cmiles74 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the bashing on Elasticsearch? We are using it to index log files; we have over 275 million documents in our index and performance has been pretty impressive.

What kind of hardware are you running that on? We are setting up a larger cluster, and are interested in the config of others. Thnx!

We're running on five EC2 instances, each instance is running Elasticsearch configured to use 25GB of RAM. With the current data set we might be able to get by with less RAM, we're still in the process of figuring out what works best for us.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#78

Post by nzadrozny »

StavrosK wrote: post #75
nzadrozny wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to like IndexTank ;) There's also my own http://websolr.com/ running Apache Solr. Some other Solr services are mentioned elsewhere on the page. I've also recently launched http://bonsai.io/ for a hosted ElasticSearch service. Because ElasticSearch is actually quite awesome (and I'm happy to answer questions about why). For Sphinx, there's Flying Sphinx (by Pat Allen of Thinking Sphinx Ruby client fame, great…

So, why is ElasticSearch awesome, apart from being a searchable document/JSON store? That's pretty obviously awesome :P

There's a lot to be said for ElasticSearch's data distribution. It does sharding and replication really well. That makes my life easier, as a service provider, as well as the life of anyone that has to manage and scale an ES cluster. Or who doesn't want to have to deal with client-side sharding or worry about how many servers can crash before their search goes down.

Here's a good video on the subject from ElasticSearch's creator: http://vimeo.com/26710663

ElasticSearch has very little ceremony around creating a new index and getting started with using it. You will eventually need to do some configuration to tune its behavior for your specific application, but the learning curve is nice and gradual. This makes ES great for exploration.

The JSON document store aspect of ElasticSearch is indeed very nice. The RESTful API is simple enough that you don't really need a client, just grab your favorite HTTP client library and start integrating. Plus, coupled with solid distribution, you're looking at a pretty viable standalone data store, IMO.

Also, very good documentation. And its user/developer community is all full of the really smart, enthusiastic early-adopter types right now :)

Not least, Lucene itself is hands down the last word when it comes to search.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#79

Post by friendlytuna »

Ecio78 wrote: post #39
edouard1234567 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://websolr.com/plans

"also" = additional to the already cited websolr ;)

And there's also LucidWorks Cloud. http://www.lucidimagination.com/products/lucidworks-search-p...

Lucid Imagination is run by some of the most experienced Solr and Lucene devs. Specifically Yonik Seeley, who created Solr.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#80

Post by tybris »

peyton wrote: post #57
aphexairlines wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon never claimed this.

Here's the initial announcement of EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2006/08/24/announc... > run on Amazon’s proven computing environment Yes, Amazon never explicitly stated, "We run our site on a fleet of EC2 instances, and you should too," but they certainly weaseled a connection with their main site that didn't exist.

It's not like they built new DCs, networks, and fleet management tools for EC2 hosts. It's all running in the same computing environment.
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