Answering Search Challenges with AWS CloudSearch

Pizza, learning and a great time to network with the fabulous PHP Community!

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Does your site have a good search mechanism? Does it offer adequate quality for results? Is it a sustainable solution for the foreseeable scale required by your site? This week Chris Irvine will share experiences from a recent project, where he converted a site's traditional search method over to a search service, specifically AWS CloudSearch. Key topics will be:

• What can go wrong with typical RDBMS based search solutions?
• What is a search service? What does AWS CloudSearch offer specifically?
• Live demo: Setup a sample search domain and explore available features
• A look at the AWS PHP SDK
• Case study: Walk through implementation details for a given site
• How much improvement did we measure? What didn't work?
• Lessons learned, the good and bad of The Cloud.

Chris Irvine is a Senior Technology Consultant and founder at Threeprong.com LLC, specializing in performance tuning, B2B integration, and custom workgroup solutions. He's local to the Portland area and a PSU alum. His professional experience includes management roles in multiple industries, and numerous development and database environments. Much of his recent projects have been in PHP/MySQL, Python, and also the FileMaker workgroup and mobile platforms.