Amazon OpenSearch Serverless - Serverless Search and Analytics

What is Amazon OpenSearch Serverless?

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is the serverless variant of Amazon OpenSearch Service that enables search and log analytics without configuring, managing, or scaling clusters. The service automatically provisions and scales underlying resources based on workload.

Billing is based on OpenSearch Compute Units (OCUs), which are automatically adjusted. This makes OpenSearch Serverless particularly attractive for workloads with variable or unpredictable data volumes, where manual capacity planning would be inefficient.

A notable use case is as a vector database for AI applications. OpenSearch Serverless supports k-NN vector search, making it suitable as a backend for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and semantic search scenarios.

Core Features

• Auto Scaling: Resources are automatically scaled as OCUs based on workload
• Collection-Based Model: Logical grouping of indices into collections for simplified management
• Vector Search: k-NN-based vector search for AI applications and semantic search
• Security Policies: Encryption, network, and data access policies at the collection level
• OpenSearch Dashboards: Built-in visualization and dashboard creation without additional infrastructure

Typical Use Cases

Serverless Full-Text Search: Applications use OpenSearch Serverless as a search backend without worrying about cluster sizing or scaling. The service automatically scales up during traffic spikes.

Log Analysis Without Capacity Planning: Teams stream logs from applications and infrastructure to OpenSearch Serverless and analyze them with dashboards without having to plan cluster capacity in advance.

Vector Database for AI Applications: Developers use OpenSearch Serverless as a vector store for RAG-based AI applications where document embeddings are stored and similar content is found via vector search.

Benefits

• No cluster management: fully serverless operation
• Automatic scaling eliminates over- and under-provisioning
• Vector search capability for modern AI applications
• Same OpenSearch API and dashboard experience as managed clusters

Integration with innFactory

As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon OpenSearch Serverless: from migrating existing search to serverless architecture and setting up vector databases for AI applications to optimizing OCU usage and costs.