Content Delivery Search installation scenarios
Content Delivery Search is built on top of Elasticsearch search technology. Depending on your environment and your expected performance needs, you can install the search feature in several ways.
Scaled-out setup
Use this setup if you want to (be able to) scale out Search. Indexing and querying are executed by separate microservices, which can be installed on different machines and as many times as you want. Performance is limited only by your hardware.
The Content Deployer extension for search is already set up for you and configured in the default Content Deployer configuration file. The Search feature also requires the installation of a RESTful client to perform the querying.
Combined indexing and querying setup
Use this setup if you prefer to combine the indexing and querying functionalities in a single service. Such a setup works in an environment where either not much indexing takes place (because your website gets updated relatively rarely), or where not much querying takes place (because your site has relatively few visitors who perform searches), or both.
The Content Deployer extension for search is already set up for you and configured in the default Content Deployer configuration file. The Search feature also requires the installation of a RESTful client to perform the querying.
Setup without an IQ query service
Use this setup for a minimal architecture, in which the website query client communicates directly with the Elasticsearch database. This places a heavier memory and CPU load on your website, because it creates queries and transforms results itself, instead of delegating that work to the IQ Query Service. This setup also limits your abilities to scale out. This setup is not recommended for production environments.