Amazon’s CloudSearch Gets Solr Powered!

This is an exciting day for Lucidworks and the Lucene/Solr community as a whole. Amazon just announced their latest version of CloudSearch. What makes this release particularly exciting for us is that they decided to move the underlying architecture to Solr! This means that current and future users of CloudSearch will now have the power, reliability and scale of Lucene/Solr backing their AWS hosted applications.

For the users and community supporting Lucene/Solr, this move means yet another industry leader is committing resources, time and talent to furthering the capabilities of the world’s leading open source search engine.  Having had a chance to catch up with the team at Amazon I can tell you that they weighed a variety of options in both open source and homegrown approaches before coming to the conclusion that Solr, with it’s vibrant community of users, wide adoption and proven reliability at scale, was the clear choice.

While the news is exciting there is still some work to be done before existing Solr applications can move seamlessly to Amazon’s CloudSearch. The biggest blocker today, and one that we look forward to seeing removed soon, is that some of the native Solr APIs are not exposed at launch. Amazon recognizes this as a challenge for existing Solr apps to migrate and is committed to rolling out full Solr API support in the future. The good news is a couple of Solr committers work for Amazon.  It’s great to see support for the community from Amazon.  We are excited about seeing Amazon donating more back to the Solr code base and making it easier for developers to create the next generation of cloud hosted data-driven applications.

At Lucidworks we are working to ensure that Amazon CloudSearch users get the same quick time to value and advanced capabilities that Lucene/Solr users get from our commercial products. In the coming months we will add support for CloudSearch to our SiLK offering. SiLK enables organizations time series data and log analysis at scale with a rich set of feature functionality for data ingestion, field extraction and visualization. SiLK brings with it support for LogStash, Kibana, Flume and other leading open source log analysis projects.  Towards the end of the year we will add CloudSearch support to the Lucidworks platform. This move will give CloudSearch users access to Lucidworks connectors, security framework, rules engine and whole lot more, including advanced search capabilities such as personalized results and recommenders.

As you can see, the next few months are going to be busy for both companies but the end results will be of great benefit to Solr users.  When great organizations come together with a commitment to furthering the mission of open source, the users win every time.

-wh