4 posts tagged with "analytics"

Standing up a search stack usually starts the same way every time. Provision an OpenSearch cluster. Stand up Dashboards next to it. Wire Dashboards to the cluster with an endpoint and credentials you paste into a config file. Make sure the security plugin lets the two talk. Decide where Dashboards keeps its saved objects. Only then do you get to the part you actually wanted: indexing data and running a query.

The Launch a search workspace stack collapses that into one button. You get a managed OpenSearch cluster and a full OpenSearch Dashboards workspace, attached and EU-resident, in minutes, with nothing to wire by hand.

Getting to your first dashboard is rarely about the dashboard. It is about provisioning a database, standing up a BI tool, opening a port, copying a connection string, and praying the two halves agree on TLS. By the time anything renders, the afternoon is gone and the chart you actually wanted is still a row in a spreadsheet.

The Launch a BI workspace stack collapses all of that into one launch. You get a complete Metabase workspace wired to your own PostgreSQL, EU-resident, with dashboards in minutes. You do not assemble it. You launch it.

When the edge gateway launched, you could put a custom domain in front of your app, get an automatic certificate, cache responses, rate limit per IP, and run a detect-only WAF. That covered the headline cases. But production has a longer list: a permanent redirect for a moved path, an HSTS header you can finally turn on, a CORS policy for the front end on another domain, an IP allow list for a staging environment, a maintenance page during a deploy. Each of those used to mean code in your origin or config you maintained yourself.

Now the full edge configuration surface is exposed per app, in the Domains & Edge tab and across the API. Redirects, headers, CORS, access control, compression, limits, and a WAF that can now block, all configured per app and applied across every EU point of presence without touching your container or redeploying anything.

Every application eventually outgrows LIKE '%query%'. Once your product catalog, help center, or log pipeline crosses a few million documents, you need an inverted index, not a sequential scan. OpenSearch provides exactly that: full-text search with relevance scoring, custom analyzers, aggregations, and a visualization layer built in.

The hard part is running it. JVM heap tuning, cluster formation, TLS certificate management, shard rebalancing, and snapshot configuration turn a "quick search feature" into a permanent ops project. FoundryDB removes all of that. You get a managed OpenSearch 2.19 cluster with TLS, authentication, automated snapshots, and monitoring out of the box.

This guide walks through deploying OpenSearch on FoundryDB and building production-quality search: from provisioning to index design, full-text queries, custom analyzers, and aggregations.