Amazon CloudSearch | General Flashcards
What is Amazon CloudSearch?
General
Amazon CloudSearch | Analytics
Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed service in the AWS Cloud that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application.
What are the benefits of running a managed search service like Amazon CloudSearch over running my own search service on EC2?
General
Amazon CloudSearch | Analytics
Amazon CloudSearch provides several benefits over running your own self-managed search service including easy configuration, auto scaling for data and traffic, self-healing clusters, and high availability with Multi-AZ. 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.
What is a search engine?
General
Amazon CloudSearch | Analytics
A search engine makes it possible to search large collections of mostly textual data items (called documents) to quickly find the best matching results. Search requests are usually a few words of unstructured text, such as “matt damon movies”. The returned results are usually ranked with the best matching, or most relevant, items listed first (the ones that are most “about” the search words).
Documents may be completely unstructured, or they can contain multiple fields that can optionally be searched individually. For example, a search service for movies might have documents with fields for title, director, actor, description, and reviews. Results returned by a search engine are typically proxies for the underlying documents, such as URLs that reference particular web pages. However, the search service can also return the actual contents of individual fields.
What benefits does Amazon CloudSearch offer?
General
Amazon CloudSearch | Analytics
Amazon CloudSearch is a fully managed search service that automatically scales with the volume of data and complexity of search requests to deliver fast and accurate results. Amazon CloudSearch lets customers add search capability without needing to manage hosts, traffic and data scaling, redundancy, or software packages. Users pay low hourly rates only for the resources consumed. Amazon CloudSearch can offer significantly lower total cost of ownership compared to operating and managing your own search environment.
Can Amazon CloudSearch be used with a storage service?
General
Amazon CloudSearch | Analytics
A search service and a storage service are complementary. A search service requires that your documents already be stored somewhere, whether it’s in files of a file system, data in Amazon S3, or records in an Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon RDS instance. The search service is a rapid retrieval system that makes those items searchable with sub-second latencies through a process called indexing.
Can Amazon CloudSearch be used with a database?
General
Amazon CloudSearch | Analytics
Search engines and databases are not mutually exclusive - in fact, they are often used together. If you already have a database that contains structured data, you might want to use a search engine to intelligently filter and rank the database contents using search keywords as relevance criteria.
A search service can be used to index and search both structured and unstructured data. Content can come from multiple sources and can include database fields along with files in a variety of formats, web pages, and so on. A search service can support customizable result ranking as well as special search features such as using facets for filtering that are not available in databases.
