This is an incredibly detailed and fun story producing a system architecture that includes Postgres, Elasticsearch & an OCR service running on a cluster of iPhones.
How much effort will one man put in to help himself and others find that meme!
Zinc is a search engine that does full text indexing. It is a lightweight alternative to elasticsearch and runs in less than 100 MB of RAM. It uses bluge as the underlying indexing library.
It is very simple and easy to operate as opposed to elasticsearch which requires a couple dozen knobs to understand and tune.
It is a drop-in replacement for elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported with zinc. Zinc provides its own UI).
From the AWS open source blog:
Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. We are making a long-term investment in OpenSearch to ensure users continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite with a rich roadmap of new and innovative functionality. This project includes OpenSearch (derived from Elasticsearch 7.10.2) and OpenSearch Dashboards (derived from Kibana 7.10.2). Additionally, the OpenSearch project is the new home for our previous distribution of Elasticsearch (Open Distro for Elasticsearch), which includes features such as enterprise security, alerting, machine learning, SQL, index state management, and more. All of the software in the OpenSearch project is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2).
Did you listen to our epic Elastic vs AWS episode on The Changelog? I’d really love to hear from the community on this subject…is this a good thing or a bad thing for open source at large? Why didn’t AWS just work with Elasticsearch (the company)?
We plan to rename our existing Amazon Elasticsearch Service to Amazon OpenSearch Service.
Ever since AWS took Elasticsearch and decided to sell a managed version of it there has been controversy around AWS and Elasticsearch. Now that the software created by Elastic is being switched to the Server-Side Public License
(SSPL), which is not a very permissive license, AWS is going ahead and forking the projects.
The debate rages around this. Few people feel sympathy with the behemoth that is AWS, but they don’t seem to be in violation of any licenses. Elastic have definitely worked hard on Elasticsearch and arguably deserves an opportunity to profit from their work. This new license raises significant concern though.
I don’t think we’ll see this settle anytime soon, just like the issue of open source sustainability is neither easy nor straightforward.
There are two fun angles coming from this article.
Sonic is a fast, lightweight and schema-less search backend. It ingests search texts and identifier tuples that can then be queried against in a microsecond’s time.
Impressive benchmarks.
A step-by-step tutorial for using Elasticsearch bucket aggregations to implement faceted navigation a.k.a. facets.
Buckle up, because this is a long ride.
From the Appbase.io team:
We started building dejavu with the goal of creating a modern Web UI (no page reloads, infinite scroll, filtered views, realtime updates) for Elasticsearch with 100% client-side rendering so one can easily run it as a hosted app on GitHub pages, as a Chrome extension or as a Docker image.
Try it for yourself.
