May 05, 2023

Thomas DiLascio

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4 min. read

SearchStax recently announced the availability of SearchStax Cloud Serverless to simplify the management and operations of Apache Solr in the cloud. 

This new offering lets developers build web and mobile applications without worrying about sizing, provisioning, or managing Solr infrastructure. Keep reading for an overview of Serverless Solr – and some helpful additional resources – to get you started today.

What is SearchStax Cloud Serverless?

SearchStax Cloud Serverless complements our SearchStax Cloud offering by providing an option that enables developers to deploy and integrate Solr quickly with their website or application at a low starting cost.

SearchStax Cloud  is our dedicated infrastructure offering of managed Solr that customers have been using since 2015 for their most demanding production Solr needs. Among other benefits, SearchStax Cloud reduces the need to hire internal search operations expertise – or if you already have that expertise in-house, SearchStax Cloud frees those teams up to focus on higher-order tasks.  

As the SearchStax Cloud offering matured over the years, we learned, especially in recent years, that developers had a need to be more agile with getting test/dev projects up and running immediately with Solr, and then moving quickly and reliably into Production thereafter. As the product team at SearchStax looked into this more deeply, we saw that we could service that problem in the market by introducing a version of our offering that removed the need for managing servers entirely. 

Our decision to offer a productized version of what we call “serverless Solr” aligns with the market trend toward serverless in general. Serverless is a deployment modality that abstracts compute operations away from the development team and ultimately benefits the project and end users alike. Like other serverless computing models, Serverless Solr eliminates the need for developers to manage servers, and that benefit reflects in the initial cost to fund the project, as well as operational agility  Now, those teams can focus on developing and deploying search applications quickly without the overhead associated with scoping infrastructure needs.

SearchStax Cloud Serverless is the product, and the underlying technology that we developed is our own  “serverless Solr,” which is different from our Dedicated Cloud offering in that Serverless focuses purely on the key Index Operations used for most successful search projects so they can be delivered rapidly and at scale. Developers can select a Serverless plan that meets their data and search volume requirements without having to hassle with cluster topology, CPU cores, Memory utilization or anything related to system stability or performance.

What are the benefits of SearchStax Cloud Serverless?

SearchStax Cloud Serverless is ideal for single-index projects with low-to-medium workloads and is designed to run on serverless compute platforms.

The top four benefits of Serverless are:

  • Scalability – With Serverless, developers can easily scale their search functionality without the need to manage servers or infrastructure.
  • Cost-effectiveness – Serverless is typically less expensive than managing your own servers or using hosted dedicated Solr infrastructure. Serverless optimizes cost efficiency by delivering scalable performance, eliminating the need for capacity planning and simplifying operations and overhead.
  • Simplified management – Developers can focus on managing and optimizing their search experience instead of managing  servers, operating systems or other infrastructure components.
  • Reduced time-to-market -Serverless can be deployed quickly, reducing the time and effort needed to set up and configure search functionality.

How do I get started with SearchStax Cloud Serverless?

Our Serverless Quick Start Guide lays out the steps for getting started with SearchStax Cloud Serverless.

  1. Set up an Account
  2. Create a serverless index
  3. Obtain the data file
  4. Upload documents to Solr
  5. Search the index

     

Serverless is available in seven regions across the globe to provide low latency proximity to client applications as well as data sovereignty.  Additional regions and Solr version support will be available in the future.

SearchStax Cloud Serverless is Drupal Ready

Many organizations, especially those with high traffic and extensive databases, choose the Drupal CMS for its integration with Apache Solr because it brings powerful search capabilities to Drupal.

SearchStax has an easy integration to connect SearchStax Cloud Serverless to the Drupal CMS using the SearchStax Search API module. For full implementation instructions, refer to the Serverless product documentation.

How much does SearchStax Cloud Serverless cost?

You can get started with a free trial to our Serverless Starter plan which allows an Index Size of 100MB and 10K Monthly Requests. The cost for the Starter plan is $9 per month when billed annually or $10 per month when billed monthly, so it is a very economical way to see how Serverless Solr would work for your environment if the 14 day free trial is not enough. 

We also have other plans available for immediate purchase directly from the Cloud dashboard. You will see these once you set up the free trial. Serverless plans scale from 1GB to 50GB of Index Size and from 1M to 30M Monthly Search Requests and range from $49 per month to $999 per month with an annual commitment.

Check out the Serverless pricing to see a comparison of all plans. Additional FAQs are available at the bottom of the pricing page.

By Thomas DiLascio

Product Manager SearchStax Cloud

"SearchStax Cloud Serverless complements our SearchStax Cloud offering by providing an option that enables developers to deploy and integrate Solr quickly with their website or application at a low starting cost."

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