As the pace of digital transformation continues to accelerate, the efficiency and capabilities of search mechanisms have become paramount. Keeping pace with this evolution, we are gearing up to enhance the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Search with the anticipated release of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Search with OpenSearch v2.8, a testament to our commitment to integrating latest open source technologies with practical application needs.
What is OCI Search with OpenSearch?
OCI first offered OpenSearch as a fully managed cloud service in May 2022. OpenSearch is an open source search and analytics suite derived from Elasticsearch 7.10. It’s designed for scalability, reliability, and provides near real-time insights on vast amounts of data. Predominantly, OpenSearch powers the following systems:
-
Enterprise and application search: Offering search capabilities within diverse applications, from ecommerce platforms to customer support systems and internal wikis.
-
Log analysis and system monitoring: Searching and indexing log files to detect anomalies, troubleshoot issues, and optimize performance.
.
New 2.8 features
OpenSearch v2.8, hosted on OCI, introduces the following features:
-
Neural search: An innovative machine learning (ML) feature, significantly elevating the relevance of search results. Neural search is an experimental feature that enables the integration of machine learning models into your search workloads.
-
Enhanced security: More authentication options, such as LDAP, SAML, and OpenID, provide a robust and safe search environment for enterprises (currently in limited availability)
-
New plugin support: Use all or some of the Neural Search, ML Commons, and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) plugin to enhance the search results for keyword or semantic queries. More plug-ins are on the way.
-
OCI’s scalability: Unmatched scalability in OCI ensures smooth indexing and searching of millions of documents.
What customers are saying about OCI Search with OpenSearch
“Samsung cares about its customers. So, we built a way to monitor and analyze nearly half a million data points per day across web communities, social SNS, new and mobile to better understand the voice of our customer,” said ChangKu Lee, speech recognition and natural language processing leader at Samsung. “OCI Search with OpenSearch provides real-time access to this data, while OpenSearch dashboards provide the ability to uncover valuable insights and make data-driven decisions faster and with greater confidence. The scalability and cost-effectiveness of OCI Search with OpenSearch has exceeded our expectations and allows us to focus on our customers without having to worry about infrastructure management. The OCI account and OpenSearch teams have been highly responsive throughout this project and our deep collaboration led to the success of this project.”

“OCI Search with OpenSearch is a key engine powering our EMITE solution,” said Steve Challans, CISO of Prophecy International. “We’ve found it to be scalable and cost over 30% less, while providing better performance around 15–20% faster than the competition with Elasticsearch 7.9. We’ve enjoyed collaborating with Oracle’s account team as well as the OpenSearch team who have been super responsive to date.”

Conclusion
The advancements from v2.3 to v2.8 of OpenSearch on OCI Search underscore Oracle’s dedication to driving innovation in the search domain. With the integration of neural search, expanded security options, and enhanced plugin support, we’re setting a new standard. But this addition is just the tip of the iceberg. Dive into our free trial and experience the full breadth of capabilities that OpenSearch v2.8 on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Search has to offer.

