Augmented Search On-Premises

Philosophy

In our desire to make our products, and features,  easier to access and use, the creation of Augmented Search environments is streamlined in Jahia Cloud: Augmented Search relies on a backend Elasticsearch infrastructure to index the content and serve search queries. Thus, there is a strong dependency between the Augmented Search solution, the Elasticsearch infrastructure, and Jahia Cloud.

Managing a solution based on Elasticsearch is not an easy process: the Elasticsearch infrastructure comes with its own challenges, and Elasticsearch regularly introduces breaking changes in their maintenance releases. One also needs to regularly upgrade the version to benefit from security and bug fixes.  So, instead of supporting Augmented Search on a variety of stacks/environments/versions, which can be a complex and tedious task, we decided to focus on supporting the stack used on Jahia Cloud, to provide the best Augmented Search / Elasticsearch experience for our cloud customers.

However, Augmented Search can be used on-premises as long as the following conditions are met.

Conditions for on-prem usage of Augmented Search

The support of an on-premises usage of Augmented Search is conditioned to the following:

• The customer must be on Jahia 8, or committed to move to Jahia 8
  • Maintenance versions will only be provided for the Jahia 8 compatible branch of Augmented Search.
  • Customers running Jahia 7.3, but committed to move to Jahia 8, can use the current version of Augmented Search compatible with Jahia 7.3, but shall not expect maintenance releases.
• The customer must follow the stack used on Jahia Cloud, including:
  • The Elasticsearch version: as mentioned above, Elasticsearch regularly introduces breaking changes in their maintenance versions, which may impact Augmented Search. Maintenance releases of Augmented Search will be compatible with the version in use on Jahia Cloud, and the compatibility with previous versions is not guaranteed. In other words, to benefit from bug fixes, you may have to also upgrade your Elasticsearch environment. Currently, our policy is to use the last 7.17.x version of Elasticsearch.
  • The necessary Jahia modules to run Augmented Search: the Augmented Search solution depends on several modules, including the Elasticsearch connector and the GraphQL provider, and you will may have to update these moduls as well when updating Augmented Search. Currently, our policy is to use the last Augmented Search version available on our store.

Elasticsearch assistance for on-premises environments

Jahia will not be able to provide assistance/support regarding the Elasticsearch on-premises environments:

• We are not the vendor of Elasticsearch
• We do not have the resources to effectively assist our on-premises customers with Elasticsearch

Thus, we highly recommend customers to have trained engineers on Elasticsearch, who can also understand the way Augmented Search works, as the source of an issue may be at the border between Elastichsearch and Augmented Search.

Pricing 

Augmented Search is not included in the jContent/jEnterprise subscriptions and shall be purchased separately. Please contact your Customer Success Manager to get a quote.