Amazon CloudSearch

What is Amazon CloudSearch?

Amazon CloudSearch enables you to search large collections of data such as web pages, document files, forum posts, or product information. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create a search domain, upload the data you want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the search service automatically provisions the required technology resources and deploys a highly tuned search index.

Amazon CloudSearch is a tool in the Search category of a tech stack.

Key Features

Simple to Configure – You can make your data searchable using the AWS Management Console, API calls, or command line tools. Simply point to a sample set of data, and Amazon CloudSearch automatically proposes a list of index fields and a suggested configuration.Automatic Scaling For Data &ampTraffic – Amazon CloudSearch scales up and down seamlessly as the amount of data or query volume changes.Low Latency, High Throughput – Amazon CloudSearch always stores your index in RAM to ensure low latency and high throughput performance even at large scale. Amazon CloudSearch was created from the same A9 technology that powers search on Amazon.com.Rich Search Features – Amazon CloudSearch indexes and searches both structured data and plain text. It includes most search features that developers have come to expect from a search engine, such as faceted search, free text search, Boolean search, customizable relevance ranking, query time rank expressions, field weighting, and sorting of results using any field. Amazon CloudSearch also provides near real-time indexing of document updates.Secure – Amazon CloudSearch uses strong cryptographic methods to authenticate users and prevent unauthorized control of your domains. Amazon CloudSearch supports HTTPS and includes web service interfaces to configure firewall settings that control network access to your domain.

Amazon CloudSearch Discussions

Discover why developers choose Amazon CloudSearch. Read real-world technical decisions and stack choices from the StackShare community.

Chris McFadden

VP, Engineering at SparkPost

Apr 7, 2019

Needs adviceon

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon CloudSearch

We send over 20 billion emails a month on behalf of our customers. As a result, we manage hundreds of millions of "suppression" records that track when an email address is invalid as well as when a user unsubscribes or flags an email as spam. This way we can help ensure our customers are only sending email that their recipients want, which boosts overall delivery rates and engagement. We need to support two primary use cases: (1) fast and reliable real-time lookup against the list when sending email and (2) allow customers to search, edit, and bulk upload/download their list via API and in the UI. A single enterprise customer's list can be well over 100 million. Over the years as the size of this data started small and has grown increasingly we have tried multiple things that didn't scale very well. In the recent past we used Amazon DynamoDB for the system of record as well as a cache in Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) for the fast lookups and Amazon CloudSearch for the search function. This architecture was overly complicated and expensive. We were able to eliminate the use of Redis, replacing it with direct lookups against DynamoDB, fronted with a stripped down Node.js API that performs consistently around 10ms. The new dynamic bursting of DynamoDB has helped ensure reliable and consistent performance for real-time lookups. We also moved off the clunky and expensive CloudSearch to Amazon Elasticsearch Service for the search functionality. Beyond the high price tag for CloudSearch it also had severe limits streaming updates from DynamoDB, which forced us to batch them - adding extra complexity and CX challenges. We love the fact that DynamoDB can stream directly to ElasticSearch and believe using these two technologies together will handle our scaling needs in an economical way for the foreseeable future.