If you need apples to apples, I would consider Elastic Site Search(previously known as Swifype). It is based on Elasticsearch, owned by the same company and has nice GUI and rank tweaking capabilities.
Managing Elasticsearch yourself is painful, I mostly struggled with version upgrades.
Obviously I lack a lot of details here. But if it was me, I would carefully measure switch from PaaS to anything that I'd have to manage myself (that's both infrastructure and index mappings). I'd rather focus building and tweaking features instead of maintaining infrastructure and index transitions.
I'd probably only switch if some of these start bothering me too much:
Manage cost
Not enough customization
Expand Elasticsearch usage (which probably falls under managing cost)
For your own projects, there is certainly nothing wrong with Alogia or Elastic Site Search.
For an open-source project where the development environment needs to be replicated is a different story. By using Amazon Elasticsearch a CloudFormation template can be written which will provision all required cloud resources required to run the app in production.
By using Elasticsearch which is an open-source project the development environment can be dockerized.
The pain with Alogia is that you have to signup for an account and its set to a trial. So to continuously develop on DEV.to you have to keep opening trial accounts or you have to pay for Alogia.
AWS also has credits for open-source projects and in addition to has a free tier which is
750 hours per month of a t2.small.elasticsearch.
Now, why would you choose Elastic Search Site/Alogia over Amazon Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search Site and Alogia or going to definitely come with many conveniences and likely will lead to greater agility when developing.
AWS gets its superpowers when you buy into the whole AWS ecosystem since my many applications can be chained together. Elasticserach is commonly used in a pattern called ELK which is one button to deploy on AWS via a CloudFormation template.
AWS gets its superpowers when you buy into the whole AWS ecosystem since my many applications can be chained together
Which is not the case with DEV, so I wouldn't really recommend the switch.
The pain with Alogia is that you have to signup for an account and its set to a trial. So to continuously develop on DEV.to you have to keep opening trial accounts or you have to pay for Alogia.
They offer you their software for free if you are a non-profit, and DEV is a business.
For the open-source contributors, yes they should be using Algolia services for free. After all, a contributor is mostly not making money out of his contributions.
I think instead of the switch into another service, algolia team (@jesswest@r4ph_t
) might consider the idea of adding a monthly free-tier for developers (and / or providing an official mock docker image like this one).
Edit: I have mentioned the topic in their feedback section, topic link here.
For an open-source project where the development environment needs to be replicated is a different story.
This is of course a concern and your whole argument makes sense (though it might be a little biased towards embracing AWS as a cloud provider) but that's not the only factor in a decision, after all DEV is also a company.
If "tomorrow" the company goes bust because its employees spend 7 days a week managing infrastructure instead of developing the actual product nobody is going to be happy, even though the code is opensource and one could pick up from there :D
I think as all technological choices all aspects need to be considered, including your argument towards using opensource :)
BTW tying the product to AWS SaaS services could possibly be another type of vendor lockin (especially if you "buy in the whole ecosystem" as you mentioned), not more or less than having Algolia as a search engine. Same goes for CloudFormation instead of Terraform I reckon.
There's obviously a will about embracing open technologies and a better interoperability but finding the right balance between SaaS services and DIY is a struggle for every company at all stages...
If you need apples to apples, I would consider Elastic Site Search(previously known as Swifype). It is based on Elasticsearch, owned by the same company and has nice GUI and rank tweaking capabilities.
Managing Elasticsearch yourself is painful, I mostly struggled with version upgrades.
@andrewbrown
Yep that's what I meant by AWS (whether CloudSearch or AWS Elasticsearch)
Those must be all provided by Algolia too, is there anything else that would urge me to switch?
@buinauskas , the same question applies to Elastic Site Search (ofc in DEV context) 🤔
Obviously I lack a lot of details here. But if it was me, I would carefully measure switch from PaaS to anything that I'd have to manage myself (that's both infrastructure and index mappings). I'd rather focus building and tweaking features instead of maintaining infrastructure and index transitions.
I'd probably only switch if some of these start bothering me too much:
@yaser
For your own projects, there is certainly nothing wrong with Alogia or Elastic Site Search.
For an open-source project where the development environment needs to be replicated is a different story. By using Amazon Elasticsearch a CloudFormation template can be written which will provision all required cloud resources required to run the app in production.
By using Elasticsearch which is an open-source project the development environment can be dockerized.
The pain with Alogia is that you have to signup for an account and its set to a trial. So to continuously develop on DEV.to you have to keep opening trial accounts or you have to pay for Alogia.
AWS also has credits for open-source projects and in addition to has a free tier which is
750 hours per month of a t2.small.elasticsearch.
Now, why would you choose Elastic Search Site/Alogia over Amazon Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search Site and Alogia or going to definitely come with many conveniences and likely will lead to greater agility when developing.
AWS gets its superpowers when you buy into the whole AWS ecosystem since my many applications can be chained together. Elasticserach is commonly used in a pattern called ELK which is one button to deploy on AWS via a CloudFormation template.
Isn't this same for any kind of development environment?
It's also Algolia, not Alogia ; )
Also ELK is not a pattern, just a stack of applications.
To me, it feels either money goes to Algolia (or any other tool) vs. that same money on something that needs more maintenance.
@buinauskas
Yep, that's what I'm trying to verify since the very start of the discussion (let alone that DEV search feature might get broken during the switch).
@andrewbrown
Thank you for sharing your view!
Which is not the case with DEV, so I wouldn't really recommend the switch.
I agree with you... partially 😁
I checked their open-source offer, and it seems a fair deal: algolia.com/for-open-source/
They offer you their software for free if you are a non-profit, and DEV is a business.
For the open-source contributors, yes they should be using Algolia services for free. After all, a contributor is mostly not making money out of his contributions.
I think instead of the switch into another service, algolia team (@jesswest @r4ph_t ) might consider the idea of adding a monthly free-tier for developers (and / or providing an official mock docker image like this one).
Edit: I have mentioned the topic in their feedback section, topic link here.
This is of course a concern and your whole argument makes sense (though it might be a little biased towards embracing AWS as a cloud provider) but that's not the only factor in a decision, after all DEV is also a company.
If "tomorrow" the company goes bust because its employees spend 7 days a week managing infrastructure instead of developing the actual product nobody is going to be happy, even though the code is opensource and one could pick up from there :D
I think as all technological choices all aspects need to be considered, including your argument towards using opensource :)
BTW tying the product to AWS SaaS services could possibly be another type of vendor lockin (especially if you "buy in the whole ecosystem" as you mentioned), not more or less than having Algolia as a search engine. Same goes for CloudFormation instead of Terraform I reckon.
There's obviously a will about embracing open technologies and a better interoperability but finding the right balance between SaaS services and DIY is a struggle for every company at all stages...
We still haven't done any thorough evaluation on this, I'm afraid we don't have a satisfactory answer yet :)