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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

#81

Post by peyton »

StavrosK wrote: post #76
peyton wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does running on Amazon mean (in 2006)? Remember, the company is officially Amazon.com, Inc., i.e. the ecommerce site turning tens of billions in revenue.

Here's an excerpt from the Businessweek cover story[1] a few weeks after EC2's launch:

> Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that.

Weeks later Bezos discussed the $2 billion investment in Amazon.com's infrastructure [2]. In effectively the same breath he mentioned 200,000 developers signed up for AWS. This is deliberately deceptive. Bezos linked AWS with Amazon.com's infrastructure, when the two are totally separate.

Signs point towards EC2 coming about through the intransigence of a couple people [3], not through a deliberate effort by top brass to rent out Amazon.com's infrastructure. Implicating the main site was a tactic to inspire confidence and provoke experimentation. It's unclear whether EC2 would have found the same success had Amazon not papered over the inchoate AWS architecture by invoking the Amazon brand.

I love AWS. Their blog is the only corporate blog I subscribe to, because everything they post is so friggin' cool. Sentences like these...

> If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you've already used the technology that underlies CloudSearch.

...are weasely and unnecessary. Maybe CloudSearch is functionally identical to Amazon.com search or maybe it isn't. Everyone understands there are tradeoffs to be made. I just wish Amazon were more transparent about its architecture.

[1]: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_46/b4009001.... [2]: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/09/we_build_muck_s.html [3]: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/am...

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

#82

Post by holdenk »

nickm12 wrote: post #60
mryan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says it is based on the same search that powers Amazon.com, so presumably it is A9: http://a9.com/

The A9 website says "Developed by A9, Amazon CloudSearch is built with the same innovative technology that powers search for Amazon.com."

And we all know how awesome Amazon.com search is......

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

#83

Post by nickm12 »

peyton wrote: post #81
StavrosK wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does running on Amazon mean (in 2006)? Remember, the company is officially Amazon.com, Inc. , i.e. the ecommerce site turning tens of billions in revenue. Here's an excerpt from the Businessweek cover story[1] a few weeks after EC2's launch: > Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare comput…

> If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you've already used the technology that underlies CloudSearch.

I don't see what is "weasely and unnecessary" about this. It's vague, sure, because "technology" is a vague word. But it seems a bit of an overreaction to believe this statement is actively trying to deceive. I read it as "we use this technology to run the amazon.com website", implying that it is up to the task of running your own web service. Time will tell if that actually proves to be true.

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

#84

Post by mthreat »

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.

Thanks, but don't pity us! I knew about amazon cloud search before I decided to start working on Searchify. I said it before and I'll say it again - any worthwhile space will have competitors. And I think today has already set the record for new signups on Searchify.

And "near-real-time" amazon, is that all you got? :)

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

#85

Post by mthreat »

edbloom wrote: post #47

Very interesting. I have a project that I'm about to start which is going to have an index of 4 million plus data records where I need high performance faceted search. I was exploring using Solr but may now give this a look as I'm planning on putting the app on EC2. Are there any technical details/tutorials on how their facets are configured?

Hope you'll excuse the shameless plug, but check out Searchify's hosted search. It covers the requirements you mention - easy-to-use, fast faceting. http://www.searchify.com/documentation/tutorial-faceting

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

edbloom wrote: post #47

Very interesting. I have a project that I'm about to start which is going to have an index of 4 million plus data records where I need high performance faceted search. I was exploring using Solr but may now give this a look as I'm planning on putting the app on EC2. Are there any technical details/tutorials on how their facets are configured?

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by codexon »

alexro wrote: post #36

IndexTank had one appealing option: it allowed to change associated statistics, like number of votes, without re-indexing the document. It also allowed to dynamically use ranking functions. Also, other solutions allow indexing in different languages, I can't find this in the CloudSearch.

How can you change statistics like number of votes without reindexing?

I don't see how that is possible unless that field wasn't indexed.

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

#88

Post by mthreat »

codexon wrote: post #87
alexro wrote: post #36

IndexTank had one appealing option: it allowed to change associated statistics, like number of votes, without re-indexing the document. It also allowed to dynamically use ranking functions. Also, other solutions allow indexing in different languages, I can't find this in the CloudSearch.

How can you change statistics like number of votes without reindexing? I don't see how that is possible unless that field wasn't indexed.

This would be stored in a numeric value. IndexTank (and Searchify which runs IndexTank) stores numeric values in a normal array in RAM. So an update is essentially equivalent to:

array[index] = updatedValue;

And then you can sort or filter by these numeric values, as well as the usual text searching. More info in the docs here: http://www.searchify.com/documentation/python-client#documen...

Note that if you update a text field, it does a normal reindex (although it's true real-time in IndexTank).

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

#90

Post by joshhart »

rb2k_ wrote: post #31
jtchang wrote: post #2

You know this doesn't seem like a bad deal though $100/mo might be high for someone just starting out. Right now my options for search are: Full text SQL search Apache Solr or something similar Google Search Appliance Custom search Google free search on your site Yay for search as a service.

And if you want a hassle free scalable search service with automatic sharding/scaling, a lucene underpinning and a nice REST API: Elasticsearch

http://senseidb.com/ is another alternative that I work on used for search at LinkedIn. It's API compatible with Elasticsearch.
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