Instaclustr is pleased to announce that searchable snapshots are now available for OpenSearch® on the Instaclustr Managed Platform. With the release of searchable snapshots, customers can now utilize the feature as a solution for storing and searching data in a more cost– and time–efficient way.
Snapshot data traditionally had to restored from remote storage in order to be queried. However, this is a costly and time-consuming exercise to perform regularly, especially given the data you are looking for might not even be contained in that particular snapshot.
Searchable snapshots solve this pain point by allowing customers to store searchable data in remote data storage like AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage, depending on the cloud provider. Customers can then perform search queries directly on the remotely stored index instead of restoring the entire index to disk.
This means that snapshot data can be searched much more efficiently, saving customers time and money when managing snapshots. All of this functionality can be quickly and easily configured on the Instaclustr Managed Platform.
Searchable snapshots will be particularly useful for customers who wish to store large amounts of long-term data and be able to query it on a regular basis. This reduces the overhead of time required to locate the snapshot, restore it to the cluster and then submit the search query. Additionally, the amount of disk required in the cluster can be decreased as less frequently accessed data is moved to remote storage, reducing costs of data storage.
At Instaclustr, we use searchable snapshots to help our security team search for events in archived audit streams. Previously, this required archived audit data to be located and restored to the cluster, creating unnecessary effort and time. With searchable snapshots, our team can locate and search archived audit data directly from the cluster.
It’s important to keep some considerations in mind when using searchable snapshots:
- Running a high volume of searchable snapshot queries can affect the performance of nodes running other jobs. To mitigate this, we recommend the use of a load balancer and coordinator nodes, both of which can be enabled on the Instaclustr Managed Platform.
- Searchable snapshots are currently only available for Run-In-Your-Own-Account (RIYOA) customers. Support for Run-In-Instaclustr-Account (RIIA) will be part of a future release.
- Search queries to remotely stored searchable snapshots will have higher latency than searches to data on disk.
- Remote storage providers charge on a per-request basis, so it is important to consider the cost implications when querying searchable snapshots.
The Instaclustr Managed Platform makes it simple to set up and configure searchable snapshots through our console, API or Terraform. We can help you run your OpenSearch clusters in the cloud of your choice, and our expert support team can assist you in setting up and monitoring your searchable snapshots. We can also help existing customers migrate to searchable snapshots.
Interested to try out searchable snapshots for yourself? Reach out to our friendly support team today and get started!