[chef] Proposal: searching via ElasticSearch

[Andrea Campi < >]

Hi all,

I made this proposal over on #chef-hacking and it gathered some
agreement, so I'm bringing it over for wider discussion.

My company (ZephirWorks) is willing to sponsor ElasticSearch support
in addition or as a replacement for Solr.
I plan to integrate it in chef-server, and modify chef-expander for indexing.

The obvious requirement is to support the exact same query syntax,
which is important overall but most of all to keep all cookbooks
working.
Also, we will demonstrate feature and performance parity or better.


More notes from IRC:

[10:08pm] andreacampi: my main motivation here is that with Solr, we
need our own schema, mostly for the analyzer
[10:08pm] andreacampi: that makes it harder in a cloud setup
[10:09pm] andreacampi: e.g. I've been beta testing LucidWorks
cloudy.io and they don't allow this level of configuration
[10:09pm] andreacampi: (although Chef still works)
[10:09pm] andreacampi: ES is more like couchdb in this regard, you
just configure it via rest


So the big question is, would this be considered for integration in Chef?
Would you add it as a configurable alternative to Solr, or would you
just replace it?

I definitely won't have anything ready for the next release, but I'm
sure I'll be done before the Community Summit.

Andrea