Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds support for hot reload of dictionary files

Posted on: Nov 18, 2020

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports the ability to reload dictionary files without reindexing your data. Elasticsearch uses analyzers to convert string data into terms or tokens that power its search capabilities. These analyzers can do things like remove white space and stop words, perform stemming, handle compound words, and add synonyms. Previously, on Amazon Elasticsearch Service these analyzers could only process data as it was indexed. If you wanted to add some additional synonyms at a later time, you had to reindex your data with the new dictionary file. 

With the new hot reload capability, you can call analyzers at search time, and your dictionary files augment the search results during the query. This feature also lets you version your dictionary files in Amazon Elasticsearch Service and update them on your domains, also without having to reindex your data. 

Hot reload of dictionary files is available on any Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain running Elasticsearch 7.8 or later. To learn more, see the documentation.

This feature is powered by Open Distro for Elasticsearch, an Apache 2.0-licensed distribution of Elasticsearch. To learn more about Open Distro for Elasticsearch and this feature, visit the project website.

Hot reload of dictionary files is now available for Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains across 24 regions globally: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), AWS GovCloud (US-Gov-East, US-Gov-West), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), Africa (Cape Town), Middle East (Bahrain), EU (Ireland, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Milan), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong), and China (Beijing – operated by Sinnet, Ningxia – operated by NWCD). Please refer to the AWS Region Table for more information about Amazon Elasticsearch Service availability.