Amazon Offers Cloud Computing Services through New Amazon CloudSearch

With all of the recent talk and hype about Cloud Computing, it should come as no surprise that consumer giant Amazon has entered into the realm of the Cloud. More specifically, this new service, dubbed CloudSearch is from Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN).

Before we talk about the new CloudSearch from Amazon, it is important to understand exactly what Amazon Web Services is. AWS was launched in 2006, to provide key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services, what we now refer to commonly as cloud computing. According to AWS, the ultimate benefit of cloud computing for businesses, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs.

Eliminating the need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources, through AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon’s expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost.

Here is an example of one business using AWS and the CloudSearch services to better illustrate the point. A company called ex.fm is a social music discovery platform offering a large collection of free, legal music on the web. “Each day, ex.fm users add more than a hundred thousand new song links to the platform. Historically, it has been a challenge to provide our customers with a fast search experience that can scale on top of this always growing dataset,” said Lucas Hrabovsky, CTO, ex.fm. “With a small team of engineers, we can’t afford to dedicate resources to manage our search infrastructure. Amazon CloudSearch takes care of everything for us – it scales beautifully and is consistently fast. And our customers have noticed. Since deploying CloudSearch in production, we’ve received very positive feedback from customers about our search speed and accuracy.”

Effectively, the new Amazon CloudSearch is a service that allows business customers to easily integrate a fast, fully managed and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. Developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want searchable, and Amazon CloudSearch automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys the highly tuned search indexes needed – as simple as that, the search functionality is up and running. Amazon CloudSearch seamlessly scales as the amount of searchable data increases or as the query rate changes, and businesses can change search parameters, fine tune search relevance and apply new settings at any time without having to upload the data again. Amazon CloudSearch offers low, pay-as-you-go pricing with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments.

With Amazon CloudSearch, customers can now quickly make any data set searchable without the additional cost and complexity of managing and scaling their own search engine.

“For many organizations, search plays a major role in how their customers experience their product or service – businesses need a sophisticated search capability to help their customers find the right information quickly. Implementing rich search functionality has traditionally been very expensive and time consuming due to the complexity of the technology required,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “Amazon CloudSearch frees customers from worrying about all of these complexities so they can easily launch powerful search functionality and pay only for the resources they use.”