lucene VS quickwit

First, a review of the landscape. As said in the introduction, there aren't a ton of good options. Apache Lucene is by far the best traditional search index from a speed, performance and functionality standpoint. It's the base for Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and many other projects. But it requires Java.

https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/10047

2. The Panama Vector API allows CPU's that support it to accelerate vector operations: https://openjdk.org/jeps/438

So this allows fast ANN on Lucene for semantic search!

How did people do this before Lucene supported it? Only through entirely different tools?

Are they forking Lucene or somehow getting the Lucene devs to increase that limit? Because this PR has been open for over a year now: https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/11507

Lucene's adaptation of Roaring uses the complement idea on a block-wise basis:

https://github.com/apache/lucene/blob/84cae4f27cfd3feb3bb42d...

Like someone said, it's in locations as specified in the path.data. Depending on sharing and replication, it could be on more than one host. Elastic uses Apache Lucene to store documents, since it's open source, that rabbit hole will welcome research :-)

It is pretty clear to me that Elastic is planning to build their ANN features differently than OpenDistro's k-NN implementation, or other plugins modules that extend Easticsearch in similar ways. They now will build on the Apache Lucene capabilities that were collaboratively built "upstream" by a number of individuals, some that work for Amazon and some that work for Elastic.

From the linked issue, it seemed that they were originally planning to develop this as a proprietary feature of Elasticsearch, without contributing the functionality to Apache Lucene, but then changed direction when the Apache Lucene developers (some of which are currently employed to do such work by Amazon) started to build its approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) vector search capabilities. [1]

It's great to see folks that work for Elastic collaborating and building on what is in Apache Lucene to extend the utility of ANN with Hierarchical Navigable Small World Graphs (HNSW) [2]! From this, I think it should be possible to implement an Open Source version of the functionality with a compatible API, if that is something that OpenSearch users seek.

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-9004

[2] https://github.com/apache/lucene/pull/250

Hi folks, Quickwit cofounder here.

We started Quickwit 3 years ago with a POC, "Searching the web for under $1000/month" (see HN discussions [0]), with the goal of making a robust OSS alternative to Elasticsearch / Splunk / Datadog.

We have reached a significant milestone with our latest release (0.7) [1], as we have witnessed users of the nightly version of Quickwit deploy clusters with hundreds of nodes, ingest hundreds of terabytes of data daily, and enjoy considerable cost savings.

To give you a concrete example, one company is ingesting hundreds of terabytes of logs daily and migrating from Elasticsearch to Quickwit. They divided their compute costs by 5x and storage costs by 2x while increasing retention from 3 to 30 days. They also increased their durability, accuracy with exactly-once semantics thanks to the native Kafka support, and elasticity.

The 0.7 release also brings better integrations with the Observability ecosystem: improvements of the Elasticsearch-compatible API and better support of OpenTelemetry standards, Grafana, and Jaeger.

Of course, we still have a lot of work to be a fully-fledged observability engine, and we would love to get some feedback or suggestions.

To give you a glance at our 2024 roadmap, we planned to focus on Kibana/OpenDashboard integration, metrics support, and pipe-based query language.

[0] Searching the web for under $1000/month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074481

[1] Release blog post: https://quickwit.io/blog/quickwit-0.7

[2] Open Source Repo: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit

[3] Home Page: https://quickwit.io

We tested S3 Express for our search engine quickwit[0] a couple of weeks ago.

While this was really satisfying on the performance side, we were a bit disappointed by the price, and I mostly agree with the article on this matter.

I can see some very specific use cases where the pricing should be OK but currently, I would say most of our users should just stay on the classic S3 and add some local SSD caching if they have a lot of requests.

[0] https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit/

Hi HN, I’m one of the builders of Quickwit, a cloud-native OSS search engine for observability. As of 2023, we support logs and traces, metrics will come in 2024.

You know the pitch: while software like Datadog or Splunk are great, they often comes with hefty price tags. Our mission is to offer an affordable alternative. So we’ve built Quickwit, we’ve made it compatible with the observabilty ecosystem (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Grafana) and above all, we’ve made it cost-efficient / “easy” to scale (well it’s never easy to scale to petabytes..).

To give you a glance at the engine performance I made a benchmark on the GitHub Archive dataset, 23 TB of events, here are the main observations:

Indexing: costs $2 per ingested TB. With 4CPU, throughput is at 20MBs However, you'll observe > 30MB throughput on simpler datasets, like logs and traces.

Search: a typical query costs $0.0002 per TB (considering both CPU time and GET request costs). Using 8CPU, a simple query on 23TB is achieved in under a second.

Storage: on S3, it costs $8 per ingested TB per month on the GitHub Archive dataset. With logs and traces, you might see costs around $5/ingested TB due to a 2x better compression ratio.

I'm eager to get your thoughts on this!

Benchmark: https://quickwit.io/blog/benchmarking-quickwit-engine-on-an-...

Github repo: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit/

Website: https://quickwit.io/

- On S3, it costs $8 per ingested TB per month on the GitHub Archive dataset. With logs and traces, you might see costs around $4/ingested TB due to a 2x better compression ratio.

I'm eager to get your thoughts on this!

[0] Benchmark: https://quickwit.io/blog/benchmarking-quickwit-engine-on-an-...

Quickwit (https://quickwit.io/) | Paris, France | Onsite and remote (based in Europe) | Full-time

The company is fully remote but we also have a small office in Paris. We prefer candidates based in Europe but can make exceptions for the right profiles.

- Senior Software Engineer 80-110k€ + 0.25-1% equity based on experience.

    We’re looking for a senior software engineer to contribute to [Quickwit](https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit), our open-source search and analytics engine. We have an ambitious roadmap for the next 18 months (performance optimization, distributed storage, support for SQL, query optimizer, revamp of our execution engine, etc.), and this is a great opportunity to shape the future of Quickwit while tackling fun and challenging problems in the field of distributed databases.

In our latest blog post, we walk you through the steps of instrumenting your Rust application and monitoring the performance on Grafana using Quickwit + Jaeger.

Link: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit