Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon CloudSearch VS Amazon ElastiCache

Compare Amazon CloudSearch VS Amazon ElastiCache and see what are their differences

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Amazon CloudSearch logo Amazon CloudSearch

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed service in the cloud that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website.

Amazon ElastiCache logo Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon ElastiCache offers fully managed Redis and Memcached. Seamlessly deploy, operate, and scale popular open source compatible in-memory data stores.
  • Amazon CloudSearch Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-12
  • Amazon ElastiCache Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-28

Amazon CloudSearch features and specs

  • Easy Setup
    Amazon CloudSearch is designed to be easy to set up and manage. You can quickly configure a search domain, upload data, and begin searching, reducing the time to market for your applications.
  • Scalability
    The service automatically scales resources up and down based on the volume of data and the rate of traffic, ensuring your search application can handle varying loads without manual intervention.
  • Fully Managed
    As a fully managed service, Amazon CloudSearch handles all the heavy lifting associated with maintaining and scaling servers, performing software patches, and monitoring health metrics.
  • Search Features
    Amazon CloudSearch supports multiple search features out-of-the-box, including faceting, highlighting, and autocomplete, providing a rich search experience without requiring custom implementations.
  • Integration with AWS Ecosystem
    It seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like S3, DynamoDB, and Kinesis, making it straightforward to ingest and process data from various sources within your AWS environment.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon CloudSearch

  • Limited Customization
    Compared to other search solutions like Elasticsearch, Amazon CloudSearch offers fewer customization options and advanced features, which might be restrictive for complex search requirements.
  • Cost
    Although pricing can be competitive, the cost can quickly escalate with large datasets and high query volumes, and it may not be as cost-effective as other solutions depending on your usage patterns.
  • Less Community Support
    Amazon CloudSearch has a smaller community and fewer third-party plugins compared to more popular search engines like Elasticsearch, making it harder to find quick solutions and best practices through community support.
  • Performance
    In some scenarios, users have reported that Amazon CloudSearch can be slower in performance compared to other search engines, particularly for complex queries or large datasets.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    Because it's a managed service, there's limited control over offline access or local development environments. This can be a hindrance if you need to debug or test changes without affecting the live environment.

Amazon ElastiCache features and specs

  • Scalability
    Amazon ElastiCache allows for seamless scaling of your cache cluster. You can easily add or remove nodes to adjust to the workload demands, ensuring efficient resource management.
  • Managed Service
    ElastiCache is fully managed by AWS, meaning that infrastructure tasks such as hardware provisioning, patching, and maintenance are handled by Amazon, reducing operational overhead for users.
  • High Performance
    Designed for delivering low latency and high throughput, ElastiCache can significantly improve the performance of applications by reducing the time to retrieve data from databases.
  • Compatibility
    It supports popular caching engines such as Redis and Memcached, allowing users to work with familiar technologies and migrate existing setups to the AWS environment with ease.
  • Security and Compliance
    ElastiCache provides robust security features including VPC integration, data encryption, and IAM policies, helping to ensure compliance with various industry standards.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon ElastiCache

  • Cost
    As a premium managed service, ElastiCache can become expensive, especially for large-scale deployments or when utilizing advanced features, which may not be ideal for all budget constraints.
  • Limited Customization
    Because it is a managed service, there are limits to the customization of infrastructure and configurations when compared to self-managed solutions, which might not accommodate all specific needs.
  • Dependency on AWS Ecosystem
    Using ElastiCache ties your infrastructure to AWS, which might not be suitable for organizations seeking a multi-cloud strategy or those who wish to avoid vendor lock-in.
  • Learning Curve
    New users may face a learning curve, especially if they are not already familiar with AWS services and console navigation, potentially requiring additional training or support.
  • Regional Limitations
    Not all features may be available in every AWS region, which could impact global deployments and necessitate strategic planning for distribution and redundancy.

Amazon CloudSearch videos

Getting Started with Amazon CloudSearch

More videos:

  • Review - Getting Started with Amazon CloudSearch: Product Tour Screencast

Amazon ElastiCache videos

Introduction to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis

More videos:

  • Review - AWS re:Invent 2019: Supercharge your real-time apps with Amazon ElastiCache (DAT208)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon ElastiCache)
Custom Search Engine
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Custom Search
100 100%
0% 0
NoSQL Databases
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon CloudSearch Reviews

Top 10 Site Search Software Tools & Plugins for 2022
Amazon CloudSearch comes with all the popular search features such as auto-complete, intelligent text processing, custom indexing, and geospatial search. It also supports 34 languages, which makes it an excellent solution for businesses that cater to an international audience or intend to expand globally.
Make Your WordPress Search Powerful with Algolia and 9 others
AWS CloudSearch is scalable and known for its high performance. Pricing is based on the usage and pays as you go.
Source: geekflare.com

Amazon ElastiCache Reviews

Comparing the new Redis6 multithreaded I/O to Elasticache & KeyDB
KeyDB was introduced nearly a year ago as a multithreaded fork of Redis with major performance gains. Soon after Amazon announced their enhanced io handling for Redis using Elasticache. Redis is now in the process of releasing their multithreaded io option in version 6.0. Unlike Redis6 and Elasticache, KeyDB multithreads several aspects including placing the event loop on...
Source: docs.keydb.dev

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon ElastiCache should be more popular than Amazon CloudSearch. It has been mentiond 13 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon CloudSearch mentions (4)

  • How does a large application's search functionality work? ELI5
    Personally, rather than trying to implement this functionality myself from scratch I would use something like Amazon CloudSearch that supports autocomplete suggestions for things that have been added to it. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How Should I Build a Search Bar
    TL;DR: Dynamo is "bad" for searching. Use something else ( Elastic, CloudSearch ) if you don't know what you're doing. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Ask HN: Why is search on Amazon so bad?
    Maybe they use:
      https://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/
    . - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
  • Options for serverless search?
    There is also Amazon CloudSearch as a managed search service but it does seem kind of abandoned from the looks of its landing page. Source: over 3 years ago

Amazon ElastiCache mentions (13)

  • Setting up Ruby on Rails with RVM, Puma, Mina, Nginx, Sidekiq and Redis on Amazon Linux 2
    Sidekiq (For background jobs processing)+ Redis (As persistence engine for Sidekiq). Since you are in AWS ecosystem you could also use Elasticache instead of local Redis, just parameterize correctly your Sidekiq if you want to do so. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Choosing the Right AWS Database: A Guide for Modern Applications
    Key-value databases are designed to store and retrieve data using simple key-value pairs, making them ideal for applications that require fast and simple data access. AWS offers a fully managed key-value database service called Amazon ElastiCache that supports popular key-value engines such as Redis and Memcached. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • How to Effectively Use Caching to Improve Microservices Performance
    Cloud-Based Caching Services: Evaluate the use of cloud-based caching services, such as Amazon ElastiCache or Redis Cloud, for managed caching solutions that offer scalability, resilience, and reduced maintenance overhead. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • AWS Beginner's Key Terminologies
    Amazon ElastiCache (database) Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that simplifies deploying, operating and scaling an in-memory cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by providing information retrieval from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. Https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) vs ElastiCache : Which One to Use?
    Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) and ElastiCache both are fully managed caching services from AWS. DAX is designed especially for DynamoDB on the other hand ElastiCache can cache anything including DynamoDB. Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon ElastiCache, you can also consider the following products

Algolia - Algolia's Search API makes it easy to deliver a great search experience in your apps & websites. Algolia Search provides hosted full-text, numerical, faceted and geolocalized search.

Redis - Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

ElasticSearch - Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine.

memcached - High-performance, distributed memory object caching system

Swiftype - The simplest way to add search to your website or application. Sign up for free.

Amazon RDS - Easy to manage relational databases optimized for total cost of ownership.