“This is tedious, time-consuming work for engineers who should focus on core business functions,” explains Timo Selvaraj, SearchBlox’s VP of product. When your teams are worried about configuring infrastructure, syncing search software, securing management APIs, managing upgrades and designing a user interface, they are not innovating. “They’re caring for your infrastructure instead of working on your core business.” says Selvaraj. Using a fully managed service allows organizations to be productive from day one and assures them of a support structure with an SLA.

We advise clients to answer the following questions before deciding to self-manage Elasticsearch-based enterprise search in the cloud:

• How big of a team will you need?

• Will you hire new engineers to staff that team or transfer engineers from other teams? If the answer is the latter, how will you replace those engineers? How much will that cost (both in terms of time and money)?

• What training do your teams require to do this job? How much will that training cost? How long will it take for them to get certified?

• How much will it cost to create monitoring and support SLAs? How long will that take?

• Have you considered networking, backup and restoration, and disaster recovery costs? How much would downtime cost your business?

• What is the cost of building and maintaining the connectors, crawlers and pipelines for data ingestion?

• What expertise do you need to build secure search interfaces and provide fine-grained user level access?

  • (For more information about securing Elasticsearch in the Cloud, see this blog post.)

• What skills does your team need for the current and future development of enterprise search and artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing capabilities?

“If you’re not thinking about all of this, you’re really not considering the total cost of ownership,” explains Selvaraj. “And, the most important question of all is this: what are the opportunity costs of managing your own enterprise search on AWS? In other words, what are you not doing when you’re doing this?”

“Our enterprise customers want all the benefits of search in the cloud without the management hassles,” explains Selvaraj. “They want to offload enterprise search operations to experts. They want the security and support that a service level agreement offers.” At SearchBlox, that product is Fully Managed Enterprise Search.