Running a Lucene Search Engine in AWS Lambda: Technical Challenges and Performance Results
By
shutty
The bagel they save for the regulars. Don't skim, savour.
Summary
The article describes an experimental approach to running a real search engine in AWS Lambda functions, challenging the conventional wisdom that search engines can't operate in truly serverless environments. The author details how they compiled a Lucene-based JVM search engine into native code, moved the index to S3+EFS, and achieved cold starts in 600 milliseconds, but ultimately failed to make the setup reasonably fast. The piece critiques modern serverless search solutions as accounting tricks with hidden infrastructure costs, and explores the technical challenges of running search engines in Lambda functions.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledModern serverless search is just an accounting trick. There's a hidden pool of nodes behind the API, and the final bill is split evenly among all clients.
You can't just put one into a Lambda function. But what if you actually can?
As someone who has hated Elasticsearch since version 0.89 (but still uses it), there are three major blockers to running it in a truly serverless mode.
How we compiled a Lucene-based JVM search engine into native code, moved the index to S3+EFS, and managed to cold-start it in 600 milliseconds, and still failed to make the setup reasonably fast.
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