Elasticsearch vs. Azure Search – Questions to Ask

Some Important Questions to Ask

• Database Indexing Capabilities and DB Engines supported?
• Specialized data types? – E.g. geospatial data types geo_point, geo_shape, or completion.
• Additional Features such as OCR and Cognitive Search?
• Pricing Models ?

Elasticsearch on Azure

If you do decide to go with ElasticSearch (over azure search),  elasticsearch can be installed from the marketplace.

(Elasticsearch may still be the more mature offering over azure search).

Some recommendations for deploying elasticsearch from the azure marketplace:

Elasticsearch – Data Nodes Recommendation – DS series of memory optimized instances Like every other data store Elasticsearch is very dependent on the amount of memory available to itself (as the JVM heap) and to the underlying host system (used for the important filesystem cache).

Elasticsearch – Storage  Recommendation – Premium Storage.  Premium Managed Disks also come with encryption at rest (via Storage Service Encryption).

Elasticsearch – Master Nodes Recommendation – For bigger clusters, we recommend having three dedicated master nodes. They will not be storing any data, but will handle cluster management tasks like creating new indices and rebalancing shards. Small D series instances are most often good enough.

Kibana Recommendation – Same as master nodes, Kibana has relatively light resource requirements. Most computations are pushed down to Elasticsearch, so you can usually run Kibana on small D series instances as well.

Logstash Recommendation – Since it typically does a lot of processing it is best deployed on the FS series.

Appendix – Elastic Search vs Azure Search Pricing

• ElasticSearch Standard – $16/mo
• ElasticSearch Gold, Platinum, Enterprise ?- Pricing Not available

Azure Search Free version

• • Storage — 50MB

• • Max Indexes/Service-3

• • Max Documents Hosted- 10,000.

• • Data Transfer- Standard Rates apply

• • Basic Version

• • Per Search Unit price: $0.101/hour or $73.73/month (and $9.70/month for West Japan and South Brazil).

• • Storage: Maximum 2GB/Service

• • Number of Documents Hosted: 1 Million

• • ScaleOut Limits: 3 units/service

• • Indexes/Service: 15

• Data Transfer- Standard Rates apply

Azure Search Standard Version 1 (S1)

• • Per Search Unit price: $0.336/hour or $245.28/month (and $324.12/month for West Japan and South Brazil).

• • Storage: Maximum 25GB/partition i.e 300GB documents per service.

• • ScaleOut Limits: 36 units/service

• • Indexes/Service: 50

• • Documents Hosted: 15 million/partition i.e 180 million documents/service.

• • Data Transfer- Standard Rates apply

• • Standard Version 2 (S2)

• • Per Search Unit price: $1.344/hour or $981.12/month (and $1,295.02/month for West Japan and South Brazil).

• • Storage: 100GB/partition i.e 1TB documents per service.

• • Indexes/Service: 200

• • Documents Hosted: 60 million/partition i.e 720 million documents/service

• • ScaleOut Limits: 36 units/service

• • Data Transfer- Standard Rates apply.