At AWS, we are constantly innovating and evolving our services to meet the ever-changing needs of our customers. In this post, we want to help you understand the differences between Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon OpenSearch Service, and how you can transition to OpenSearch Service.
CloudSearch is a fully managed service in the cloud that makes it straightforward to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application. With CloudSearch, you can search large collections of data such as webpages, document files, forum posts, or product information. You can quickly add search capabilities without having to become a search expert or worry about hardware provisioning, setup, and maintenance. As your volume of data and traffic fluctuates, CloudSearch scales to meet your needs. CloudSearch is internally powered by a customized version of Apache Solr, and supports features such as full-text search, Boolean search, prefix search, term boosting, faceting, hit highlighting, and auto-complete suggestions.
OpenSearch Service is a managed service that makes it seamless to deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch, a popular open source search and analytics engine. OpenSearch provides best-in-class search capabilities, providing you with all the search features of CloudSearch plus a vector engine supporting semantic search on vector embeddings, and support for both dense and sparse vectors. In addition, with OpenSearch Service, you get advanced security with fine-grained access control, the ability to store and analyze log data for observability and security, along with dashboarding and alerting. You’ll have all of CloudSearch’s capabilities and more.