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This comes out at a time when I've finally decided to start digging into ElasticSearch. Since it's a side project, I don't have to worry about scaling and manag

by blutoot 12y ago

This comes out at a time when I've finally decided to start digging into ElasticSearch. Since it's a side project, I don't have to worry about scaling and management issues. So just from the standpoint of functionalities, is there any advantage of this Search as a Service over an ElasticSearch cluster on Azure's Virtual Machines?

Maarten88 12y ago
A colleague of mine also experimented with ElasticSearch on Azure. His server got hacked and was shut down by Microsoft after they discovered it generated large amounts of traffic and participated in DOS attacks. (there was a vulnerabiliy, and many ElasticSearch servers were hacked a few months back) So I'd argue that using Azure Search Service, being managed, will free you from worries of having to manage and update yet another technology.
- tatalegma 12y ago
  Was his server hacked due to the recent vulnerability found in ElasticSearch?
liamca 12y ago
Hi blutoot, I am a Program Manager for Azure Search, so you will have to take this response as perhaps being a little ones-sided. I think you will find that getting elastic search up and running in Azure to be very easy. As to your point about not worrying about scaling or management issues using ElaticSearch on Azure VM's, I don't agree with this. There are so many things that you will still need to be concerned about. For example, Azure will periodically do VM updates and patches which will cause your VM's to occasionally be restarted. This of course would affect your search availability which means if you can not permit downtime, you need to think about replicas across VM's and how to manage availability groups so that the patches are applied in a way that you can avoid downtime. Then you have to think about how you are going to handle partitions and how you will shard your index across machines in the case where you need more than one VM to accommodate the amount of data you have in your index. All of these things and parts that we in Azure Search take on for you and make easy for you to scale up/down whether you need more replicas for higher QPS or higher availability or more partitions to allow for greater numbers of documents or faster data ingestion. There is actually quite a lot more to managing a search service (even in a cloud hosted IaaS environment), but hopefully this gives you a few things to think about. Liam

by blutoot 12y ago

Maarten88 12y ago

A colleague of mine also experimented with ElasticSearch on Azure. His server got hacked and was shut down by Microsoft after they discovered it generated large amounts of traffic and participated in DOS attacks. (there was a vulnerabiliy, and many ElasticSearch servers were hacked a few months back) So I'd argue that using Azure Search Service, being managed, will free you from worries of having to manage and update yet another technology.

tatalegma 12y ago
Was his server hacked due to the recent vulnerability found in ElasticSearch?

liamca 12y ago

Hi blutoot, I am a Program Manager for Azure Search, so you will have to take this response as perhaps being a little ones-sided. I think you will find that getting elastic search up and running in Azure to be very easy. As to your point about not worrying about scaling or management issues using ElaticSearch on Azure VM's, I don't agree with this. There are so many things that you will still need to be concerned about. For example, Azure will periodically do VM updates and patches which will cause your VM's to occasionally be restarted. This of course would affect your search availability which means if you can not permit downtime, you need to think about replicas across VM's and how to manage availability groups so that the patches are applied in a way that you can avoid downtime. Then you have to think about how you are going to handle partitions and how you will shard your index across machines in the case where you need more than one VM to accommodate the amount of data you have in your index. All of these things and parts that we in Azure Search take on for you and make easy for you to scale up/down whether you need more replicas for higher QPS or higher availability or more partitions to allow for greater numbers of documents or faster data ingestion. There is actually quite a lot more to managing a search service (even in a cloud hosted IaaS environment), but hopefully this gives you a few things to think about. Liam