Cloud-Native Search: Building Scalable Search Services on AWS

Cloud platforms offer unique advantages for search infrastructure. This article explores architecture patterns for building cloud-native search services on AWS. We cover using EC2 instances with local NVMe storage for low-latency index access, Application Load Balancers for query distribution, and Auto Scaling Groups for demand-based capacity. Data pipeline patterns include using Kinesis for real-time document ingestion, S3 for index snapshots, and Lambda for async document processing. Cost optimization strategies cover reserved instances for baseline capacity, spot instances for batch indexing, and S3 Intelligent-Tiering for backup storage. Monitoring and observability use CloudWatch custom metrics, X-Ray for distributed tracing, and SNS alerts for SLA breaches. The article includes a complete Terraform configuration for deploying a production Solr cluster.