Content Delivery search feature architecture

Search in Content Delivery consists of several pieces of architecture.

In the left side of this diagram, authors publish content from the content management system to a Content Delivery environment, where Content Deployer picks up the Transport Package. As part of the deployment pipeline, the Content Deployer executes a step for updating the search index. Concretely, this means that the IQ Index client sends indexable content to the IQ Index Service, which instructs the Elasticsearch search engine to store this new information. Updating the index is near-instantaneous.

On the right side of the diagram, visitors of your website enter a search query on a page of your website. This results in an IQ Query client call to the IQ Query Service, with a constructed query. The IQ Query Service interacts with the search engine to retrieve the matching results from storage, and returns them to the website to show to the visitor.

In a production environment, you would run the IQ Index Service and IQ Query Service as separate microservices, possibly on separate machines, and possibly even multiple instances of one or the other, or of both. In a Development or Test environment, on the other hand, you may want to install them jointly as the IQ Combined Index and Query Services microservice.