[liamca]

Hi blutoot,

I am a Program Manager for Azure Search, so you will have to take this response as perhaps being a little ones-sided. I think you will find that getting elastic search up and running in Azure to be very easy. As to your point about not worrying about scaling or management issues using ElaticSearch on Azure VM's, I don't agree with this. There are so many things that you will still need to be concerned about. For example, Azure will periodically do VM updates and patches which will cause your VM's to occasionally be restarted. This of course would affect your search availability which means if you can not permit downtime, you need to think about replicas across VM's and how to manage availability groups so that the patches are applied in a way that you can avoid downtime. Then you have to think about how you are going to handle partitions and how you will shard your index across machines in the case where you need more than one VM to accommodate the amount of data you have in your index. All of these things and parts that we in Azure Search take on for you and make easy for you to scale up/down whether you need more replicas for higher QPS or higher availability or more partitions to allow for greater numbers of documents or faster data ingestion. There is actually quite a lot more to managing a search service (even in a cloud hosted IaaS environment), but hopefully this gives you a few things to think about.

Liam