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Amazon CloudSearch

maintenance

by Amazon Web Services · since 2012 · also known as AWS CloudSearch

AWS's original managed search service, closed to new customers since July 2024.

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maintenance. Closed to new customers on July 25, 2024; existing accounts keep running with fixes only and no new features. AWS recommends migrating to Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Overview

Amazon CloudSearch is a managed search service launched by AWS in 2012 and rebuilt on Apache Solr in 2014. It handles indexing, scaling and patching automatically and offers text, faceted, geo and structured queries over uploaded JSON or XML batches. AWS closed it to new customers on July 25, 2024; existing accounts can keep using it and still get security and availability fixes, but no new features. AWS points migrations to Amazon OpenSearch Service, which also brings vector search that CloudSearch never got.

Full-text searchGeospatial

Strengths & trade-offs

Strengths

  • +Zero-ops: AWS manages scaling, patching and replicas
  • +Simple batch-upload indexing model
  • +Faceting, highlighting, autocomplete and geo search
  • +IAM-integrated access control

Trade-offs

  • −No longer accepting new customers; feature-frozen
  • −No vector or semantic search
  • −Coarse relevance tuning compared with OpenSearch
  • −Instance-hour pricing is expensive for small workloads

Great for

  • +Maintaining existing CloudSearch-backed site search
  • +Simple faceted catalog search for legacy apps

Think twice for

  • −Any new project
  • −Vector, hybrid or RAG workloads
  • −Log analytics

Capabilities

Native or official first-party support · 5 of 25 tracked

✓Secondary indexes
✓Full-text search
✓Geospatial
✓Durable persistence
✓Role-based access
–Transactions
–Joins
–Vector search
–JSON
–Change data capture
–Triggers
–Stored procedures
–Materialized views
–TTL / expiry
–Pub/Sub
–Columnar storage
–In-memory
–Compression
–Encryption at rest
–Time travel
–Branching
–Online schema changes
–Streaming ingest
–Offline sync
–Runs in WebAssembly

Scale & consistency

Comfortable data size
Medium · ≤ 10 TB
Horizontal scaling
Native
Multi-region
No
Transactions
None
Consistency
Eventual
Schema
Strict
Architecture
Distributed, Serverless
Query languages
Simple, Structured, Lucene, DisMax

Automatically adds partitions and replicas as data and traffic grow; optional Multi-AZ.

Deployment

Self-hosted Vendor-managed cloud Serverless Embedded Edge Kubernetes operator

available on · AWS

Amazon CloudSearchAWS

Ecosystem

apis & protocolsREST/JSON, AWS API
client languagesAWS SDKs (Java, Python, JavaScript, .NET, Go, Ruby, PHP)

Alternatives to Amazon CloudSearch

Compare all→
OpenSearchSearch Engine56.6

Apache-licensed, foundation-governed fork of Elasticsearch for search, vectors and observability.

amazon-cloudsearch vs opensearch →
ElasticsearchSearch Engine75.1

Lucene-based distributed search and analytics engine for text, vectors, logs and metrics.

amazon-cloudsearch vs elasticsearch →
AlgoliaSearch Engine54.3

Hosted search-as-a-service with fast typo-tolerant search, merchandising and AI ranking.

amazon-cloudsearch vs algolia →
TypesenseSearch Engine28.8

In-memory, typo-tolerant search engine in C++ with vector, hybrid and conversational search.

amazon-cloudsearch vs typesense →
Azure AI SearchSearch Engine32.4

Microsoft's managed search service for full-text, vector, hybrid and agentic retrieval on Azure.

amazon-cloudsearch vs azure-ai-search →
ZincSearchSearch Engine5.1

Lightweight single-binary full-text search engine in Go with Elasticsearch-compatible ingest.

amazon-cloudsearch vs zincsearch →

Amazon CloudSearch FAQ

What is Amazon CloudSearch?

Amazon CloudSearch is a search engine database by Amazon Web Services, first released in 2012. Amazon CloudSearch is a managed search service launched by AWS in 2012 and rebuilt on Apache Solr in 2014. It handles indexing, scaling and patching automatically and offers text, faceted, geo and structured queries over uploaded JSON or XML batches. AWS closed it to new customers on July 25, 2024; existing accounts can keep using it and still get security and availability fixes, but no new features. AWS points migrations to Amazon OpenSearch Service, which also brings vector search that CloudSearch never got.

Is Amazon CloudSearch open source?

No. Amazon CloudSearch is proprietary, closed-source software.

Does Amazon CloudSearch support ACID transactions?

No. Amazon CloudSearch does not provide ACID transactions; its consistency model is eventual.

Does Amazon CloudSearch scale horizontally?

Amazon CloudSearch scales horizontally out of the box, with built-in sharding or partitioning. It is comfortable at medium scale (≤ 10 TB).

How can I run Amazon CloudSearch?

You can use the vendor's managed cloud. It is available on AWS.

What is Amazon CloudSearch best for?

Amazon CloudSearch is a strong fit for maintaining existing CloudSearch-backed site search and simple faceted catalog search for legacy apps. Think twice for any new project.

What are the best alternatives to Amazon CloudSearch?

Common alternatives to Amazon CloudSearch include OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Algolia, Typesense and Azure AI Search. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.

Is Amazon CloudSearch still maintained?

Amazon CloudSearch is in maintenance mode. Closed to new customers on July 25, 2024; existing accounts keep running with fixes only and no new features. AWS recommends migrating to Amazon OpenSearch Service.

How popular is Amazon CloudSearch?

Amazon CloudSearch ranks #439 of 844 databases on the WhichDB Score (3.3/100), and #24 among search engine databases. The score combines public adoption signals such as package downloads, GitHub activity, job posts and developer discussion.