Migrating from Azure Search to SearcStax
- 1. From Azure Search to SearchStax Portland SUG #10 August 2021
- 2. Making the case: Azure Search vs Solr 2
- 3. Hosting options Azure hosted and self managed Azure hosted and partner managed Azure hosted and Sitecore managed (partner managed) Deployment models PaaS AKS Azure Search vs Solr Solr blows away Azure’s limits Solr has better performance – > it’s 4x faster when indexing Solr is available in more regions than Azure Solr is significantly less expensive for larger deployments As of Sitecore XP 10.0.0, Azure Search is deprecated and will be completely removed in the next release (v 10.1) 3
- 5. Managed Solr Fully Managed Search Service • Search infrastructure automation • Alerts and monitoring • Backups and Disaster Recovery solutions • Public and private cloud environments on AWS, Azure and Google SearchStax’s Managed Solr & Site Search 5 Site Search Relevant & Personalized Search • Gain search insights & analytics • Marketing managed search with advanced search capabilities & personalization • Search experience management • Search results optimization (A/B Tests)
- 6. SearchStax for Sitecore • High availability - Multi-node clusters with fault tolerance architecture. Cross-region backup and disaster recovery options for mission-critical apps. • Global clusters - Support for 60+ regions across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform • Uptime and support SLA for mission-critical applications - Uptime and response time SLA guarantees 24x7 coverage; less than 30 minutes response time • Multi-cloud - Run your search infrastructure on any cloud--ours or yours--including AWS, Azure and Google • Designed for developer productivity - Build applications faster without losing control using automation, APIs, and Webhooks • Secure - Built-in security controls, features, and processes to meet compliance standards, including SOC 2 Type II certification 6
- 8. Problems with a DIY Solr implementation and maintenance Solr is not a core expertise There is no doubt that your developers have the skills to deploy, manage and scale Solr — but is that the best use of their valuable time? Focus your team on value-added tasks that improve the customer experience. High availability Solr is complicated Setting up and managing high availability Solr is time consuming and has many moving parts. Your team not only needs to ramp up on Solr, Java and Zookeeper — but also do it in a high availability fashion. Solr operations are a distraction Free your team from incident management, planned and unplanned maintenances, post- mortem, security updates, patches and continuous infrastructure improvements. 8
- 9. Features of SearchStax for Sitecore • Checks the connectivity between Sitecore and Solr running on SearchStax • Uploads config files to the Solr deployment • Determines if the Solr is running on a single non-production node, or if it’s a multi-node production-grade high-availability cluster. • Creates appropriate collections in Solr • Configures collections for redundancy and high-availability if it detects Solr is running as a cluster • Creates aliases for XDB collections • Updates the config files in Sitecore to make sure it is able to communicate with the Solr 9
- 10. Sitecore Managed Cloud architecture 10
- 11. Compliance âś“ SOC2 Type II Certified âś“ Privacy Shield Framework âś“ GDPR Compliance âś“ Data Sovereignty âś“ CSA CAIQ âś“ PCI DSS Security âś“ Encryption in Transit âś“ Encryption at Rest âś“ Basic Authentication âś“ IP Filtering âś“ SearchStax User Roles âś“ Audit Logs âś“ Zookeeper Security âś“ SearchStax Dashboard Security Built in compliance
- 12. How it works 13
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- 19. Managed Solr 20
- 20. SearchStax Managed Solr features Multi-cloud Scalability Private environments Flexible architectures Disaster recovery 21 Webhooks Integrations Management APIs
- 21. Multi-regional cloud options for Managed Solr 22
- 22. MULTI-REGION CLUSTER Production Deployment High Availabilityand Performance with cross-regionredundancy DEVELOPMENTNODE PRODUCTION CLUSTER Solr Architectures for any scale from Development to Production
- 23. Auto-ScaleTriggerMechanism TRIGGER RESULTS Scheduled Action Scheduled Action helps define rules to perform scaling actions at certain times in future ChangeCapacity+2 nodesat 3:00pm PST on December21, 2020 ChangeCapacity-1nodeat 3:00pm PST on December30, 2020 Scaling Rules Scaling Rules help define rules to performscaling actions depending upon alerts trigged via Managed Solr ChangeCapacity +1 node if Alert(CPU_Utilization > 65% and < 75%, 5mins) UpperBound: 10 ChangeCapacity +3 nodes if Alert(CPU_Utilization > 85%, 5mins) UpperBound: 10 ChangeCapacity -1node if Alert(CPU_Utilization < 30%, 5mins) LowerBound: 2 ChangeCapacity +2 node if Alert(RequestsPerSecond> 100, 5mins) UpperBound: 10 Scaling Service Request Service Requests allow customers to submit ad-hoc scaling requests (unplanned or not well defined) ChangeCapacity +1 node Save Infrastructure Costs — Pay for what youneed Scaling automation options to help deal with traffic changes Copyrights © SearchStax® Inc. 2014-2020.AllRights Reserved.
- 24. Copyrights © SearchStax® Inc. 2014-2020.AllRights Reserved. SearchStaxsupports Managed Solr deploymentsin Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) on AWS or Google Cloudand on Virtual Private Networks (VNet)on the MicrosoftAzureCloud Private environments for security and performance
- 25. Disaster recovery options Hot • A standby system that replicates your production or active environment. • An interruption in service at the primary site triggers a rapid switch to the standby site. • The standby system runs in a different cloud-provider region. Warm • A single-node version of a “hot” system • Limited throughput and redundancy • Lower-cost option relative to Hot Cold • Uses Cross-Region Replication to write your backup file to a remote region • There is no standby deployment and no expense for maintaining one • If the primary system fails, SearchStax engineers spin up a new deployment in the remote region and restore a pre- positioned backup. 26
- 26. Management APIs for managing Solr deployments remotely • Authentication • Users • Basic Auth • IP filtering • Deployment • DNS Alias • Backup/Restore • Tags • Alerts • Webhooks • Zookeeper 27
- 27. Integrations for additional monitoring and alerting • New Relic monitoring • New Relic APM – application analytics • New Relic Servers – server metrics • Pager Duty alerts 28
- 28. Alerts & webhooks for advanced customizations Alerts – create alerts based on a selection of metrics Webhooks – add custom functionality based on alerts 29
- 29. Site Search 30
- 30. Reliable & trusted implementation partner Search configuration Search analytics Search UX accelerator SXA Toolbox support Sitecore personalization and testing support 31
- 31. With SearchStax UX Accelerators deliver site search best practices on your site in less than 60 minutes. âś“Search feedback âś“Prominent search bar âś“Auto-suggestions âś“Facets âś“Color coded categories âś“Promotions âś“Spellcheck âś“Alternative result views âś“Sorting âś“Pagination Get up and running quickly
- 32. Use a dashboard interface to configure search features with facets, synonyms, stopwords, spell checking, auto-suggest and related searches. âś“Results and Display âś“Hit Highlighting âś“Faceting âś“Stopwords âś“Synonyms âś“Spell Check âś“Auto-Suggest Manage search without coding
- 33. Create or edit differentmodels to quicklytest and compare competing search experiences.Give specific fields the boost they need to rank higher in results.Use Rules to improve the search experience.Promote content to the top of the results page to create customized experiences. âś“Multiple Relevance Models âś“Search Fields âś“Ranking âś“Rules âś“Promotions Improve search ranking & relevance with Relevance Models
- 34. Relevance models are also used in Sitecore personalization 35 Models allow customizing search fields, search ranking, search rules, and custom promote search results in a given order for a particular query.
- 35. SXA Toolbox support for the search page rendering 36
- 36. ✓Dashboard ✓Most Popular Searches ✓No Result Searches ✓Searches With No Clicks ✓Most Clicked Content ✓Least Clicked Content ✓Power Search (search query reporting) May 30, 2021 — June 30 2021 1.4k 185 TOTAL SEARCHES TOTAL CLICKS CLICK-THROUGHRATE 12.8% CONVERSIONSFROMSEARCH AVERAGECLICKPOSITION 5 4 3 AVERAGE CLICK POSITION 2 1 CLICK-THROUGHRATE 50 40 30 CLICK-THROUGH RATE % 20 10 NORESULTSSEARCHES 10 NO RESULTS SEARCHES % 5 06-05 06-12 06-19 06-26 07-03 06-05 06-12 06-19 06-26 07-03 06-05 06-12 06-19 06-26 07-03 TIME TIME TIME AVERAGESEARCHLATENCY 5.8MS ▼37.9% SiteSearch Straight-forward search analytics