jeancochrane
commented
4 years ago A first step I took here was to check if there was any simple alternative to Solr that we might want to explore first. I decided to trial Elastic App Search, a service by the creators of ElasticSearch that provides a developer-friendly API on top of an ElasticSearch instance along with a sleek dashboard for tuning the setup and an open source React template providing a quick search interface.
In general my impression was similar to #8: this is a really good idea that's not yet mature enough to put into production, but as we move toward incorporating React into more projects, we may want to keep an eye on it.
Specifically, some things I liked about Elastic App Search where:
- Out of the box search configuration works really well
- Suggestions and autocomplete by default
- Dashboard-based relevance tuning is very easy to work with
- Provides public read-only API keys by default, making integration and deployment easy
- Super easy to set up and manage search index
- Templates make it very fast to get a working search interface up and running (I had something up in about an hour)
Some things I didn't like:
- Templates are under development and difficult to customize in some areas, e.g. the Result component or providing a "no results found" view
- Documentation is still pretty sparse, especially for the templates (I had to read a lot of React code to figure out how to customize it)
- ElasticSearch and App Search both require 2GB free RAM each to run, with 5GB disk space, which is prohibitively expensive on Heroku
- The managed services themselves for both ElasticSearch and App Search are both quite expensive (~$50/mo/instance) especially compared to WebSolr
Overall the idea is really solid and I'm brainstorming how we might steal the key ideas (templates for quickly setting up a basic search interface, fast deployments, well-tuned base configs) for our own Solr deployment work.
hancush
Background
One of the last pieces that is keeping us from feeling confident in deploying complex apps on Heroku is that we don't yet know how to schedule jobs.
Proposal
I want to take a look at the Heroku Scheduler and related apps to define a way of scheduling tasks on Heroku.
Deliverables
I plan to update the Heroku documentation to include my guidance on how to do this.
Timeline
I expect this to take 2-3 R&D days.