Search

After building search functionality for multiple startups and watching countless developers struggle with Elasticsearch setup, I’ve learned that most tutorials either oversimplify or overcomplicate the process. Here’s the setup that actually works in 2025. Why Elasticsearch 9.1 Changes Everything In August 2024, Elasticsearch returned to open source under the AGPL license starting with version 8.16.0. Version 9.1.0 is now fully open source, which means you can finally use it without license concerns for most projects. ...

Vector Search in Elasticsearch: Building Production-Ready AI-Powered Search That Actually Scales After our Elasticsearch bill hit $3,000/month for basic vector search, I learned these optimization tricks that cut costs by 85% while improving relevance. Three months ago, our team jumped on the AI bandwagon and replaced our traditional search with “semantic search powered by vectors.” The demo looked amazing. Production was a disaster. Our Elasticsearch cluster was constantly under memory pressure, queries took 2+ seconds, and our AWS bill exploded. ...