PlatformLayer adds Solr-as-a-service, 1 day after AWS CloudSearch launch

http://blog.justinsb.com/blog/2012/04/14/platformlayer_solr_as_a_service/

by justinsb • 14 years ago

11 5 14 years ago

blog.justinsb.com

justinsb3• 14 years ago

Which service should PlatformLayer add next?

amirnathoo• 14 years ago

"7 bullets vs 3 bullets. PlatformLayer is more than twice as good!"

'nough said. I'm with PlatformLayer.

gtani• 14 years ago

While the cloudSearch config does look kind of clunky compared to SOLR, it is kind of FUDDY if you're implying that cloudsearch won't let you configure these at all: tokenizers, stemmers, scoring, ISO latin to ASCII mapping, stuff like that

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/cloudsearch/latest/develop...

justinsb3• 14 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out. What I've found with aws is that it all looks good until you want to do anything beyond the basics. Then you spend a lot of time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting to get around the aws limitations. With solr and lucene, you can create whatever you want.

It reminds me of the whole "share-cropper" argument.

That said, the auto sharding is pretty cool. We will probably have to wait for the next version of solr for comparable simplicity.

justinsb3• 14 years ago

I need to apologize: I hate it when people respond with assertions, rather than facts; and I did that myself there. Sorry!

So; taking stemming as a concrete example:

* With Lucene/Solr, stemming is done with a pluggable class; you can write your rules as a series of exceptions, word by word, but really you'll want to write code for anything non-trivial. Here's an example for Norwegian: http://e-mats.org/2009/05/modifying-a-lucene-snowball-stemme...

AWS only allows word-by-word exceptions, and only allows 500KB. If you need more than 500KB, look like it's more undifferentiated heavy lifting for you...

* With AWS "some basic algorithmic stemming is always performed, such as removing plural suffixes". I think that means you can't turn it off. A lot more documentation is needed there, not least as to what these immutable rules are.

* Solr ships with a bunch of different languages built in; AWS appears only to support English (although I can't believe this is right!)

I'm sure AWS will fix some of these points eventually; but they might not consider it worthwhile to do so, or may not do so on your schedule. With open source, you always have an option.

And this is just stemming! With scoring functions, you're limited to the AWS mini-language, rather than being able to write whatever you want. etc.

PlatformLayer adds Solr-as-a-service, 1 day after AWS CloudSearch launch

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