Josh Dzielak, Developer Advocate as Algolia wrote interesting article about building search engine from scratch.
At the core of Algolia is a built-from-scratch search engine exposed via a JSON API. In February 2017, they processed 21 billion queries and 27 billion indexing operations for 8,000+ live integrations.
In this post tehy’ll look at how their stack is designed from the ground up to reduce latency and the tools we use to monitor latency in production.
The article touches many interesting topics including deployment, scaling, monitoring, collaboration, teams. Josh also quickly describes their stack. Many people are surprised when they’ll learn that:
- The Algolia search engine is written in C++ and runs inside of nginx
- API clients connect directly to the nginx host where the search happens
- Algolia runs on hand-picked bare metal (high frequency CPUs)
- Algolia uses a hybrid-tenancy model (shared and dedicated)
- Algolia doesn’t use AWS or any cloud-based hosting for the API