Several of Allcloud’s projects this year have focused on enterprise search and integration in the cloud.

When choosing a back-end search platform, the general requirements are common: the ability to ingest a lot of content, query its full text quickly with flexible options, and secure the data in transit and at rest.

Sometimes you plan to write all of the crawling and indexing logic yourself. Other times, you may prefer a pre-built connector to a storage tier. The amount of data in your search index, the granularity of that data, and your management requirements may vary wildly.

To help make decisions between cloud search platforms, I’ve organized common decision criteria into a simple table:

Elasticsearch is one of my favorite platforms. It’s an open source RESTful search platform built on Lucene.

Elasticsearch provides amazing performance, incredible scale, easy management, and virtually every feature you’d expect from a search index. It’s no surprise that over the past few years, it has become the de facto standard for building web search applications.

The core Elasticsearch product is free, and thus can be hosted in several ways:

A. Infrastructure-as-a-Service: On virtual machines or Docker / Kubernetes containers.

B. Managed Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Through Elastic themselves or a partner like AWS or Qbox. This provides the same control as hosting it yourself without the overhead of patch management, backups, and monitoring.

C. Platform-as-a-Service (Simplified): Microsoft’s Azure Search PaaS offering is built upon Elasticsearch and offers most, but not all, features.

After deploying multiple Elasticsearch instances in each scenario, here’s a list of tips.

The enterprise search market has changed dramatically this decade. With Google’s recent announcement that their Search Appliance has reached end-of-life, they’ve joined a distinguished list of vendors that have ceded the market. I’m sure they’ll be back with a cloud-first business search solution soon, but they’ve left a void that many vendors are trying fill.

Compared to just six years ago, the enterprise search market is virtually unrecognizable. Back in 2010, search was tightly bound to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), leaving only a handful of software giants able to seriously compete. In 2016, organizations are less reliant on single-vendor “walled garden deployments”, allowing more variety and competition.