Launching and Scaling Elasticsearch

August 21, 2014

Elasticsearch is widely hailed as an alternative to SharePoint or many of the other open source alternatives, but it is not without its problems. Ben Hundley from StackSearch offers his input on the software in his QBox article, “Thoughts on Launching and Scaling Elasticsearch.”

Hundley begins:

“Qbox is a dedicated hosting service for Elasticsearch.  The project began internally to find a more economical solution to Amazon’s Cloudsearch, but it evolved as we became enamored by the flexibility and power of Elasticsearch.  Nearly a year later, we’ve adopted the product as our main priority.  Admittedly, our initial attempt took the wrong approach to scale.  Our assumption was that scaling clusters for all customers could be handled in a generalized manner, and behind the scenes.”

Hundley walks through reader through several considerations that affect their own implementation: knowing your application’s needs, deciding on hardware, monitoring, tuning, and knowing when to scale. These are all decisions that must be made on the front-end, allowing for more effective customization. The upside of an open source solution like Elasticsearch is greater customization, control, and less rigidity. Of course for a small organization, that could also be the downside as time and staffing are more limited and an out-of-the-box solution like SharePoint is more likely to be chosen.

Emily Rae Aldridge, August 21, 2014

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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