Azure Search service upgrades: New hardware, unlimited document counts, and more!

Today we are happy to announce performance upgrades to all paid service tiers in Azure Search. For the exact same price, these upgraded Azure Search services have roughly double the compute power of the previous hardware configuration that backed Azure Search. Additionally, services in the Standard tier began using SSD storage under the hood, compared to HDD storage used previously.

What does this mean for Azure Search?

With these service upgrades, we removed the document count limits from the Basic and Standard pricing tiers. This means that only storage limits are enforced in new Azure Search services. Depending on a scenario’s workload, these upgraded services may also benefit from faster indexing and querying performance at the same exact price points.

The Basic tier now supports an increase in the number of indexes from 5 to 15. Also in the Basic tier, Azure Search can now support up to 15 data sources and indexers per service. For the Standard 3 High Density pricing tier (great for multitenant scenarios), we were able to remove the 200 million document per partition limit, only enforcing per-index limits.

Unlimited document counts

These upgrades allow Azure Search to no longer enforce document count limits on Basic and Standard services. However, storage limits are still enforced and our testing and benchmarking have revealed some practical limits to the new hardware:

Specific storage usage depends on several factors such as number of fields, size of the content in the fields, the specific search attributes defined in the index schema, and others.

Supported regions

The new hardware configurations and relaxation of limits are available in most regions where Azure Search is offered. Today, the upgraded hardware is available in the following regions: Brazil South, Canada Central, Central India, East US, North Central US, North Europe, South Central US, Southeast Asia, UK South, West Europe, and West US.

Azure Search began using the upgraded hardware for newly created services in these regions beginning in late 2017. To learn more about which limits apply to an existing service, use the Azure portal to view limit information on your service’s overview page.

The following regions are still using the old hardware configuration of Azure Search and enforce the previous limits: Australia East, East Asia, Japan West, and West Central US.

Next steps

To create an Azure Search service with the new hardware and limits, just provision a Basic or Standard tier Azure Search service in one of the supported regions. The newly created service will automatically use the upgraded hardware.

Read more about Azure Search and its capabilities and visit our documentation. Please visit our pricing page to learn about the various pricing tiers of Azure Search.

Source: Azure Blog Feed