Shipping Elasticsearch on a small budget

Search is one of those features that sounds small and grows teeth.

Start with the database

For a few thousand records, a well-chosen index and a LIKE or full-text query is often enough, and it has no extra moving parts.

When Elasticsearch earns its place

Typed-as-you-go suggestions, typo tolerance, relevance tuning and large document sets are the real reasons to add it.

Keep it small

One node, one index per content type, and a nightly reindex job you trust. Add replicas when traffic asks for them, not before.