Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today introduced Amazon CloudSearch, a new service that allows customers to easily integrate a fast, fully managed and highly scalable search functionality into their applications.
Developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want searchable, and Amazon CloudSearch automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys the highly tuned search indexes needed – as simple as that, the search functionality is up and running. Amazon CloudSearch seamlessly scales as the amount of searchable data increases or as the query rate changes, and businesses can change search parameters, fine tune search relevance and apply new settings at any time without having to upload the data again. Amazon CloudSearch offers low, pay-as-you-go pricing with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments. To get started with Amazon CloudSearch, visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch.
“Amazon CloudSearch frees customers from worrying about all of these complexities so they can easily launch powerful search functionality and pay only for the resources they use.”
Prior to today, building robust search capability required dedicated engineering teams who would spend weeks, or even months, provisioning, configuring and deploying costly search infrastructure and software. On top of that, companies had to hire search specialists to constantly monitor, manage and adjust the search solution as traffic volumes change. With Amazon CloudSearch, customers can now quickly make any data set searchable without the additional cost and complexity of managing and scaling their own search engine.
Amazon CloudSearch leverages the same A9 technology that powers search for Amazon.com and provides businesses with high throughput and low latency so they can deliver a fast search experience to their customers. The service provides a rich query language that enables businesses to search within particular fields, perform complex Boolean searches, retrieve facet information, and specify the data included in the search results. Setup and configuration is simple and easy to use as the service automatically detects and recommends the ideal search fields from a sample data set. Settings can also be easily customized from the AWS Management Console.
ex.fm is a social music discovery platform offering a large collection of free, legal music on the web. “Each day, ex.fm users add more than a hundred thousand new song links to the platform. Historically, it has been a challenge to provide our customers with a fast search experience that can scale on top of this always growing dataset,” said Lucas Hrabovsky, CTO, ex.fm. “With a small team of engineers, we can’t afford to dedicate resources to manage our search infrastructure. Amazon CloudSearch takes care of everything for us – it scales beautifully and is consistently fast. And our customers have noticed. Since deploying CloudSearch in production, we’ve received very positive feedback from customers about our search speed and accuracy.”
Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research organization. “We have integrated Amazon CloudSearch in Synapse, our informatics platform for collaborative biological research that will serve as a public resource for the scientific community,” said Michael Kellen, Ph.D., Director of Technology and Software Development at Sage Bionetworks. “The search service built by CloudSearch will help scientists find and use relevant data from a broad set of scientific resources. We have been impressed with the power and flexibility of CloudSearch, and how quickly we were able to use it to get a new search system up and running – we had CloudSearch instances functional in less than an hour and fully integrated with our application and deployed to our users in less than a month.”
“For many organizations, search plays a major role in how their customers experience their product or service – businesses need a sophisticated search capability to help their customers find the right information quickly. Implementing rich search functionality has traditionally been very expensive and time consuming due to the complexity of the technology required,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “Amazon CloudSearch frees customers from worrying about all of these complexities so they can easily launch powerful search functionality and pay only for the resources they use.”
About Amazon Web Services
Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services — now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon’s expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 28 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan and Singapore.