1.
Amazon CloudSearch
& Future Search Architectures
Iain Fletcher
ifletcher@Searchtechnologies.com
The expert in the search space

2.
Agenda
A brief introduction to Search Technologies
Search Application Architectures
Common challenges, emerging architectures
Our thoughts about Amazon CloudSearch
The expert in the search space

3.
Search Technologies Overview
Ascot, UK
Karlsruhe, DE
Cincinnati, OH
Herndon, VA
San Diego, CA
San Jose, CR
• The leading IT Services company dedicated to
Enterprise Search & Search-based Applications
• Implementation, Consulting, Managed Services
• 120 employees and growing
• Independent, working with all of the leading
software vendors and open source alternatives

4.
500+ Customers

5.
Future Search Architectures
The expert in the search space

6.
A Traditional Integrated Architecture
Integrated Search Engine
Content
Sources
Employee
Directory
CMS
File Share
Etc.
Connectors
Index Pipeline
Search
Index
UI
The year is 2013, but we still have:
Dissatisfaction with search results
Scalability issues (various)
High initial investment
Inflexibility in the model
Data integration issues…
The expert in the search space

7.
Reasons for Change
Today’s leading “indexing engines” are very capable
The challenges to success almost always lie in
peripheral tasks. On the indexing side of the house,
this means:
Gathering and feeding data to the search engine
Preparing data for indexing (normalization, metadata
enrichment. Etc.)
The expert in the search space

8.
Reasons for Change
The need to cope with continuous and rapid data
growth
Things usually break first on the data gathering side of
the house
E.g. The Government department and the 7TB File Server
The expert in the search space

9.
A Traditional Integrated Architecture
Integrated Search Engine
Content
Sources
Employee
Directory
CMS
Connectors
Index Pipeline
Search
Index
UI
RE-INDEX
File Share
Etc.
The expert in the search space

10.
A Better Search Architecture
Iterative
Development
Content
Sources
Employee
Directory
CMS
Etc.
Content
Processing
Connectors
Secure
xml
Cache
Search Engine
Index
Pipeline
Search
Index
RE-INDEX
Better operational agility
The expert in the search space

11.
A Better Search Architecture
Iterative
Development
Content
Sources
Employee
Directory
CMS
Etc.
Content
Processing
Connectors
Secure
xml
Cache
Amazon CloudSearch
Index
Pipeline
Search
Index
RE-INDEX
Better operational agility
Much improved cost of
ownership
The expert in the search space

12.
Let’s take a look at Amazon CloudSearch
If you’ve ever switched on an EC2 server, then
you can switch on a CloudSearch server
And of course, switch it off just as easily
Xml or JSON in, for indexing
RESTful / xml out, for searching
Has the bases covered in terms of core search
functionality
The expert in the search space

13.
Amazon CloudSearch: Important Search Functions
Full-on Search Navigators
Results sorting by property
Plenty of relevancy tuning controls
Indexing speed is impressive
We’ve tested up to 500 docs/sec
Very long results lists can be served
The expert in the search space

14.
Cost Effective & Flexible
The usual benefits of AWS
Only use what you need
Elastic scalability
Maintenance inclusive
Compare that to the cost of a Service Level Agreement for
an on-premise alternative
Then add the labour costs….
From less than £50 per month
The expert in the search space

15.
What do you need to get started
Repository Connectors
Capture content
Convert to xml
XSLT. Etc.
Content Processing
Java code, Groovy. Etc.
A framework product, E.g. Aspire
Commercial software to suit the
purpose
Amazon S3
Atlassian Confluence
Documentum
eRoom
Secure File Systems
IBM Connections
JIVE
Lotus Notes
RDBMS
SharePoint 2010, 2013
SocialCast
TeamForge
Web Crawling
A User Interface
The expert in the search space

16.
Search-specific UI/UX builders are available
The expert in the search space

17.
What Applications Suit Amazon CloudSearch?
In principle any
CloudSearch is an option that everyone should
consider for search-based applications
Especially where elastic scalability is an advantage
Or where the data already lives in the cloud,
including S3 buckets
The expert in the search space

18.
To conclude
If you like Amazon Web Services, then you’ll like
CloudSearch for the same reasons
It is a full-function indexing engine, ideally suited to
agile, flexible search architectures
If you are looking for a search-based application, it
should be on your shortlist
For many applications, CloudSearch will prove to be
highly cost effective
The expert in the search space

19.
My email:
ifletcher@searchtechnologies.com
Useful URLs:
Connectors for Cloudsearch
www.searchtechnologies.com/cloudsearch-data-connectors.html
Aspire Content Processing Framework
www.searchtechnologies.com/aspire.html
A Java API for Amazon Cloudsearch
www.searchtechnologies.com/java-api-amazon-cloudsearch.html
Enterprise Search Surveys
www.searchtechnologies.com/enterprise-search-surveys.html
Blog: Searching Wikipedia with Amazon CloudSearch
www.searchtechnologies.com/cloudsearch-data-connectors.html
White Paper: A Big Data Architecture for Search
www.searchtechnologies.com/big-data-enterprise-search-architecture.html
The expert in the search space