With the popularity of ChatGPT and Large Language Models (LLM), everybody is talking about it. On my Linkedin home page, about 90% of the posts seem to speak about ChatGPT, AI, and LLM. With my experience in search solutions and interest in everything related to Natural Language Processing and Search, I also had to start working on solutions.
Last week, at the end of April 2023, I attended the HaystackConf in Charlottesville, USA. HaystackConf is the conference to participate in if you are a search relevance engineer. With over a hundred people attending on-site and more than a hundred online, this is a good representation of the almost 4000 members at the time of writing in the search relevance community on Slack.
As a seasoned Java programmer, usually with Spring Boot, it hurts to learn that most lambdas use JavaScript/TypeScript. What if you want to keep writing your Lambda in Java? A query in google teaches us that Quarkus is the way to go. This blog post introduces Quarkus, GraalVM, and we top it off with AWS CDK to deploy the sample.
Everybody is talking about serverless, and with serverless comes serverless functions. Small pieces of code (in theory) that receive an event (input) and return a message (output). They do not need a server. Therefore they are serverless, and they scale on demand. On the AWS platform, a serverless function is called a Lambda. In theory, you write the code, and AWS takes care of the rest. There is a reason why I put “in theory” in some locations in the text. Even writing the hello world sample does need some authorization configuration, and when running complete Docker images as a lambda, you cannot talk about small pieces of code. Time to focus on typical usage patterns for lambdas.
If there is one thing that I have seen a lot with elasticsearch clusters in the wild, it is problems with security. The out of the box Elasticsearch installation does not have a user_id password protection like most databases do. Using the basic license these days does give you the option, but you still have to configure it yourself. When AWS introduced their AWS Elasticsearch service, it did not configure security out of the box. Therefore Elasticsearch clusters have been famous for exposed data. Check an article like this, but there are lots more. Does this mean Elasticsearch should not be used? No, but you must know what you are doing.
Is it a bomb under the open source model, or a genius move to protect their business from pirates?
On January 14, 2021 a blog post was published on Elastic’s website, titled: licensing change. In this blog post, they announced a license change in the next release of all their tools (including Elasticsearch and Kibana). The purpose of this change is mainly to block AWS: Elastic wants to make it impossible for AWS to create its own competing managed Elasticsearch service. The announced changes were not very well received in the open source world. In this blog post I tried to give an overview of what happened, and what the consequences are for companies that use Elasticsearch and Kibana. Just a disclaimer, I am not a lawyer. Hence I will not go into the content of the new license model. The aim of this post is mainly to provide an overview of varying opinions on the internet and the possible consequences for users.
