SearchBlox Software, a privately held firm with an established customer base of over 300 clients from 30 countries, provides high-performance content search software for a diverse set of applications. SearchBlox search software leverages Apache Lucene, a full-featured text search engine library, as its core search technology, and supports indexing and searching of content including PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in 37 languages.
SearchBlox is also fully available on Amazon EC2, enabling a cost-effective search solution with no upfront investment in hardware or additional software licenses. According to SearchBlox, “The combination of SearchBlox Replication and the on-demand computing power of Amazon EC2, provide instant scalability and high availability of the search infrastructure and make it the ideal choice for vertical search applications.”Users of SearchBlox can easily scale both horizontally and vertically on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. They can utilize an array of cloud based services like Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, for example, to bring multiple Amazon EC2 instances to handle incoming search traffic. In particular, the replication feature of SearchBlox replicates search indexes from one Amazon EC2 instance to a completely different Amazon EC2 instance, thereby ensuring scalability and durability of the deployment on AWS. Deploying a distributed search system with underlying failure resilience can all be done using the AWS Management Console instead of dealing with any complex command line scripting.
The different types of Amazon EC2 instances give SearchBlox customers more variety when selecting which server configurations to deploy. For example, high CPU instance types are used for crawling and indexing operations since they require more computing power for data crunching, while standard Amazon EC2 instance types are perfect for search servers that handle search queries. Even with large volume of searches, results are exceptionally fast and search results are returned back in less than 250 milliseconds.
SearchBlox has developed specific Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are fully integrated with Amazon DevPay, which gives their customers a pay-as-you-go, pay-for-what-you-use option for search as opposed to paying money up front to purchase software licenses. “SearchBlox chose AWS to provide the SaaS solution as it was the perfect match for the pay as you go model that SearchBlox wanted to provide to its customers.”
AWS has enabled SearchBlox to do what they do best – provide outstanding search infrastructure to the world. Their users don’t need to devote large amounts of time and money in building out the underlying infrastructure for a scalable search solution – it is fully available through AWS with just a few clicks.
Amazon Case Study: SearchBlox Software
Date: 28-08-2013