Forum Discussion
What value can ACS bring to a project
Hello all, Im Carlos Acosta! I like to be involved with the Azure community and would like to learn about ACS in general, as its an area in Azure i'm not very familiar with. What value can it brin...
liamca-msft
Microsoft
MicrosoftHi @Carlos, thanks for considering ACS. One of the goals of ACS is to make it easy for developers to build an effective search application over your data. The important point to note about this is that it is a platform (PAAS) which means it will leverage API's that allow you to build a custom application to suit your needs. This gives you a lot of flexibility in what the application can do, but it does require the application to be created. In addition, from the "value" perspective, what we try to do is to bring in additional capabilities into search that otherwise would be hard (if not impossible) for a company to build. For example, the new semantic search capability (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/semantic-search-overview) we introduced the knowledge of Bing to help do things such as answer questions based on your content and help understand the intent of a users query to find extremely relevant search results.
liamca-msftMicrosoft
MicrosoftCould you also help me understand what you mean by "first hand experiences"? Are you looking for perhaps case studies of examples? Or maybe demos or code examples on how to help get started?
- Thank you for the answer! Yes, case studies would be great. I'm more interested in the architectural point of view of Azure, so getting case studies of projects that have integrated ACS, seeing what other resources have been used alongside it, etc. For example, I saw a post saying blob storage works well along ACS, is it therefore the recommended storage resource for my data to use ASC? What alternatives can be used?
- liamca-msftFor case studies, you can find a lot of them here: https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/search?sq=%22Azure%20Cognitive%20Search%22&ff=&p=0&so=story_publish_date%20desc
I don't know if they go into enough architectural detail, but I hope they help as a start. Our Microsoft Account team is also very good at helping to define potential architectures for your specific needs, so I hope you might have one of these or maybe your company can start a conversation with Microsoft to get this started. From their our PM team can often get involved where needed to help with any unique aspects of the architecture.
When you have individual questions, I also highly recommend Stackover flow with the azure-cognitive-search tag (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/azure-cognitive-search) as this is monitored by our engineering team. This however is not appropriate for discussions such as architecture, but does help with individual questions you might have.
