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AWS Data Pipeline vs Elasticsearch: What are the differences?
What is AWS Data Pipeline? Process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services. AWS Data Pipeline is a web service that provides a simple management system for data-driven workflows. Using AWS Data Pipeline, you define a pipeline composed of the “data sources” that contain your data, the “activities” or business logic such as EMR jobs or SQL queries, and the “schedule” on which your business logic executes. For example, you could define a job that, every hour, runs an Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)–based analysis on that hour’s Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) log data, loads the results into a relational database for future lookup, and then automatically sends you a daily summary email.
What is Elasticsearch? Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine. Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).
AWS Data Pipeline can be classified as a tool in the "Data Transfer" category, while Elasticsearch is grouped under "Search as a Service".
Some of the features offered by AWS Data Pipeline are:
- You can find (and use) a variety of popular AWS Data Pipeline tasks in the AWS Management Console’s template section.
- Hourly analysis of Amazon S3‐based log data
- Daily replication of AmazonDynamoDB data to Amazon S3
On the other hand, Elasticsearch provides the following key features:
- Distributed and Highly Available Search Engine.
- Multi Tenant with Multi Types.
- Various set of APIs including RESTful
Elasticsearch is an open source tool with 42.4K GitHub stars and 14.2K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Elasticsearch's open source repository on GitHub.
Hey everybody! (1) I am developing an android application. I have data of around 3 million record (less than a TB). I want to save that data in the cloud. Which company provides the best cloud database services that would suit my scenario? It should be secured, long term useable, and provide better services. I decided to use Firebase Realtime database. Should I stick with Firebase or are there any other companies that provide a better service?
(2) I have the functionality of searching data in my app. Same data (less than a TB). Which search solution should I use in this case? I found Elasticsearch and Algolia search. It should be secure and fast. If any other company provides better services than these, please feel free to suggest them.
Thank you!

Hi Rana, good question! From my Firebase experience, 3 million records is not too big at all, as long as the cost is within reason for you. With Firebase you will be able to access the data from anywhere, including an android app, and implement fine-grained security with JSON rules. The real-time-ness works perfectly. As a fully managed database, Firebase really takes care of everything. The only thing to watch out for is if you need complex query patterns - Firestore (also in the Firebase family) can be a better fit there.
To answer question 2: the right answer will depend on what's most important to you. Algolia is like Firebase is that it is fully-managed, very easy to set up, and has great SDKs for Android. Algolia is really a full-stack search solution in this case, and it is easy to connect with your Firebase data. Bear in mind that Algolia does cost money, so you'll want to make sure the cost is okay for you, but you will save a lot of engineering time and never have to worry about scale. The search-as-you-type performance with Algolia is flawless, as that is a primary aspect of its design. Elasticsearch can store tons of data and has all the flexibility, is hosted for cheap by many cloud services, and has many users. If you haven't done a lot with search before, the learning curve is higher than Algolia for getting the results ranked properly, and there is another learning curve if you want to do the DevOps part yourself. Both are very good platforms for search, Algolia shines when buliding your app is the most important and you don't want to spend many engineering hours, Elasticsearch shines when you have a lot of data and don't mind learning how to run and optimize it.

Rana - we use Cloud Firestore at our startup. It handles many million records without any issues. It provides you the same set of features that the Firebase Realtime Database provides on top of the indexing and security trims. The only thing to watch out for is to make sure your Cloud Functions have proper exception handling and there are no infinite loop in the code. This will be too costly if not caught quickly.
For search; Algolia is a great option, but cost is a real consideration. Indexing large number of records can be cost prohibitive for most projects. Elasticsearch is a solid alternative, but requires a little additional work to configure and maintain if you want to self-host.
Hope this helps.
Pros of AWS Data Pipeline
- Easy to create DAG and execute it1
Pros of Elasticsearch
- Powerful api322
- Great search engine314
- Open source230
- Restful214
- Near real-time search199
- Free96
- Search everything83
- Easy to get started54
- Analytics45
- Distributed26
- Fast search6
- More than a search engine5
- Easy to scale3
- Awesome, great tool3
- Great docs3
- Potato2
- Document Store2
- Great customer support2
- Intuitive API2
- Reliable2
- Nosql DB2
- Fast2
- Easy setup2
- Highly Available2
- Great piece of software2
- Ecosystem1
- Scalability1
- Not stable1
- Github1
- Elaticsearch1
- Actively developing1
- Responsive maintainers on GitHub1
- Easy to get hot data1
- Open1
- Community0
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Cons of AWS Data Pipeline
Cons of Elasticsearch
- Resource hungry7
- Diffecult to get started6
- Expensive5
- Hard to keep stable at large scale4