Azure Search: The Most Underrated Feature in Cloud Computing

When you decide to move your enterprise application to the cloud or change your cloud service provider, you will be moving an enormous amount of data. Given that your enterprise application is custom-made, searching for the files in cloud databases like Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Storage blobs using a custom search methodology is slow and high in resource utilization. The case is the same with other cloud service providers.

But, in the case of Microsoft Azure, it doesn’t need a custom search methodology. Azure Search can comb heterogeneous document sources such as blobs, document DB, text files, etc. faster. The Azure Search provides the ability to search through your cloud contents with ease in just a few clicks. This feature can be a real time and money saver when you want your cloud migration to be done as quickly as possible.

Azure Search is a search-as-a-service cloud solution that gives developers APIs and tools for adding a rich search experience to go over your content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications. It uses indexes for faster retrieval/search and accepts data from any source, provided it is submitted with a JSON data structure. The query language gives the ability to perform filter results using Boolean expressions.

All the computing power to perform the search operation is executed in the cloud so the client machine may focus on other business functionalities while the search operation is on. There are various filters we can apply while performing this search operation. The search can be restricted to the folders or containers where the logged in user has access to.

The search returns various pre-configured faceted results, and when the user selects any facet(value) Azure service is used to fetch further results using the selected facet as a query parameter. This can be analogous to any ecommerce site where the user is presented with various items and further results if the user clicks (selects) any item. Search traffic analytics are collected and analyzed to unlock insights from what users are typing into the search box.

Do you have questions about migrating your application to the Cloud? We can help.