Amazon has added search to its cloud.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the online retail giant, introduced Amazon CloudSearch today, which lets companies add search functionality to applications hosted in AWS's cloud environments.
AWS is a kind of virtual data center for companies that don't want to boot up and configure their own servers. Companies pay for the computing resources they need and can add and remove systems very quickly. It's used by Samsung, Farmers Insurance and Netflix, to name a few.
CloudSearch sounds pretty simple, according to Amazon's description. Developers create a search domain, upload the data to be searched, and CloudSearch then combs through the data and indexes it so it can be searched. Previously AWS customers had to build these capabilities on their own.
CloudSearch will use the same A9 technology that underpins search for Amazon's online store.
The new tool will be good news for smaller customers with tight budgets. "With a small team of engineers, we can't afford to dedicate resources to manage our search infrastructure," read a canned statement from Lucas Hrabovsky, the chief technology officer of ex.fm, a music-sharing site.
The amount of data AWS houses in S3 -- its storage service -- has skyrocketed in the last six months. The company reported that in the first quarter of 2012 it stored over 905 billion "objects" -- a term for all ranges of data, from values to formulas to images -- and routinely handled 650,000 requests for those objects each second. In the fourth quarter of 2011 S3 stored 762 billion objects.
