CloudSearch is a flexible managed search service that can support searches across applications, web sites, databases and even storage.
“An ever-increasing number of AWS customers are adopting CloudSearch and we are scaling accordingly. We are reducing the hourly charge for CloudSearch by up to 50%, across all AWS Regions and search instance types. This change is effective as of November 1, 2014 and will take effect with no action on your part. With this change, the overall cost to run CloudSearch compares very favorably to the cost of setting up, running, and scaling your own search infrastructure,” the blog, which listed no author, said.
AWS searches can also be tracked and logged via the recently announced integration with AWS CloudTrail.
CloudTrail offers log files by recording AWS API calls. “The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service,” Amazon said. “With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing.”
Performance through Partitions
Search performance can make or break your web site as users tend to leave when the system doesn’t deliver results fast enough. For internal use, their satisfaction search apps, storage and databases is likewise based on speed.
Amazon is now allowing customers to set up index partitions within the search domain, a technique designed to speed big uploads. It can mean that each partition has fewer documents so each are retrieved more quickly.
While there are myriad search technologies that can be deployed by IT, CloudSearch has the presumed advantage of tight integration with AWS, and the fact that the service can just be added to your Amazon bill. “Amazon CloudSearch provides several benefits over running your own self-managed search service including easy configuration, auto scaling for data and traffic, high availability with Multi-AZ, and automatic node monitoring and recovery,” Amazon said. “With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create a search domain and upload the data you want to make searchable, and Amazon CloudSearch automatically provisions the required resources and deploys a highly tuned search index.”
