So using their numbers (max 36 'units', 15 qps per unit, 25GB) that is a max search corpus of 540M documents or 900GB, 540qps, $4,500 (approx) per month which is a discount of 50% so $9K/month when full up). Does anyone know if the 36 host limit arises out of the requirement that all units are in the same rack?<p>I'm wondering what the target market for that is?
"Currently Azure Search does not offer configurable analysis modes" ( source: <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn798920.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn798920.aspx</a> )<p>The configurable analysis is the cornerstone of the search functionality and is a huge portion of Apache Lucene (and therefore both Solr and ElasticSearch).<p>So, in my eyes, this offering has not outgrown the pure web-search domain yet.<p>(edit) Which is strange, because in another comment they do say they use ElasticSeach under the covers. I even thought that the API interface looked somewhat similar to ES.
My main problem with this is that a standard instance is $125/mo for anything beyond the free limits (10k documents, 50mB). It would be great to see pricing that followed, say, Azure Websites or SQL pricing... $20-40/mo for smaller instances (smaller by either search volume or index size).<p>I mean, after all, if SQL Azure supported Full Text Indexes, this wouldn't be critical either.
This comes out at a time when I've finally decided to start digging into ElasticSearch. Since it's a side project, I don't have to worry about scaling and management issues. So just from the standpoint of functionalities, is there any advantage of this Search as a Service over an ElasticSearch cluster on Azure's Virtual Machines?
this looks fairly promising if the performance is there and you are already using azure for your data since you push into an index versus crawl/pull.<p>looking at the tech specs [1] you can only search a single index at a time which is pretty limiting. hopefully just a limit of the preview.<p>[1] <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn798933.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn798933.aspx</a>