Algolia offers hosted consumer-grade search via API for websites, mobile and voice apps. The fact that you don’t have to install, patch, nor scale servers/software qualifies it as a Serverless BaaS (Backend as a Service). WHY ALGOLIA: @JoeEmison – the father of “Serviceful Serverless” term, is a serial Technical Co-founder who created (and sold) 4 companies in the last 3 years using Serverless Technologies. Algolia was used in all of them! This means that Algolia can become an important tool in your Entrepreneur’s Toolkit too. Serverless Toronto Community was lucky to have a special guest Aaron Stillwell from Algolia’s UK office (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-stillwell) fly to Toronto and answer our questions about creating relevant, scalable, and lightning-fast Search and Data discovery experiences. Thank you Aaron, here is the recording of your lecture: https://youtu.be/G4ottFOTf2w FUN FACT: Algolia is a Y Combinator Winter 2014 graduate (http://bit.ly/algolia-ycw14) and it is an interesting coincidence that Aaron spoke in Toronto the very same day when Michael Seibel – Y Combinator CEO and Partner (https://ycombinator.com), spoke at Collision conference here https://photos.app.goo.gl/9EqFjb362kbdsfYi6 :) SPONSORS: Special thanks to our venue sponsor Myplanet (https://myplanet.com), catering sponsor DEV (https://dev.to/) - online community for developers by developers, and Manning Publications (https://manning.com) for their monthly giveaways!

1. Tuesday, May 21, 2019
1. Intro & Activity Update
2. Community Open Mic
3. Aaron Stillwell: “Algolia: simpler,
faster alternative to Elasticsearch
& Solr Search Engines”
4. Networking
1
ServerlessToronto.org Meetup Agenda

2. Serviceful Serverless theme continues:
2

3. 3
https://dev.to
Where programmers share ideas and help each other grow

4. dev.to (or just DEV) Community
4

5. Manning Publications 2019 giveaways:
1. www.manning.com/books/serverless-applications-with-nodejs
2. www.manning.com/livevideo/production-ready-serverless
3. www.manning.com/livevideo/production-ready-serverless
4. www.manning.com/livevideo/serverless-applications-with-AWS
5. www.manning.com/livevideo/serverless-applications-with-AWS
6. www.manning.com/books/serverless-architectures-on-aws
7. www.manning.com/books/http2-in-action
8. www.manning.com/books/event-streams-in-action
9. www.manning.com/books/the-design-of-everyday-apis
10. www.manning.com/livevideo/graphql-in-motion
11. www.manning.com/books/voice-applications-for-alexa-and-google-assistant
12. www.manning.com/livevideo/machine-learning-for-mere-mortals
13. www.manning.com/books/classic-computer-science-problems-in-python
14. www.manning.com/books/getting-mean-with-mongo-express-angular-and-node
5

6. Community Open Mic
6
10 seconds of freedom
to pitch yourself, or
your company

7. Serverless Toronto
May 2019
Aaron Stillwell
Solutions Engineer (London, UK)

8. Agenda
History of Search & Algolia
Docsearch / Open source
Indexing, Ops & Architecture
Building an engaging front-end
search experience
Voice/Image search
1
2
3
4
5

9. 3
Popular search engines today

10. Search
engine use
cases
Analytics systems
Log analysis
Time series data
Data visualization
Consumer-grade search of
structured data
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

11. A look at lucene’s explain
2.4824 sum of:
1.4570 weight(tags:movies in 127) [DefaultSimilarity], result of:
1.4570 score(doc=127,freq=2.0 = termFreq=2.0), product of:
0.7079 queryWeight, product of:
2.9105 idf(docFreq=147, maxDocs=1000)
0.2432 queryNorm
2.0581 fieldWeight in 127, product of:
1.4142 tf(freq=2.0), with freq of:
2.0000 termFreq=2.0
2.9105 idf(docFreq=147, maxDocs=1000)
0.5000 fieldNorm(doc=127)
1.0255 weight(tags:kids in 127) [DefaultSimilarity], result of:
1.0255 score(doc=127,freq=1.0 = termFreq=1.0), product of:
0.7063 queryWeight, product of:
2.9038 idf(docFreq=148, maxDocs=1000)
0.2432 queryNorm
1.4519 fieldWeight in 127, product of:
1.0000 tf(freq=1.0), with freq of:
1.0000 termFreq=1.0
2.9038 idf(docFreq=148, maxDocs=1000)
0.5000 fieldNorm(doc=127)
https://chrisperks.co/2017/06/06/explaining-lucene-explain/

12. Speed, Relevance, Developer Experience

13. 2012: Introducing a mobile-ready
Search engine

15. 2013: Why not host this engine in the cloud?

16. 10
Algolia’s bare-metal infrastructure
Algolia’s point of presence
US-EastUS-West
France
Germany
Russia
Hong Kong
Singapore
Australia
Brazil
UAE
India
Japan
Canada
South Africa
US-Central
Netherlands

18. Our infra at a glance (mid-2018)
60+
Data centers
40B+
Searches/mo
160B+
API calls/mo
10
GBPS of Traffic
20k+
QPS
60GB+
Read+write per second (SSD)
1300+
Servers
1.2PB
SSD stroage
148TB
RAM

20. We believe interactions with software
should be rewarding and meaningful.
Search is critical to our projects and we
equip teams to build and iterate quickly.

21. Investors
$74M
FundingFounded
2012
Employees
320Our Business
Algolia

22. The API at scale
57
Data centers
100+
Countries
50B+
Searches/mo
320+
Employees
7K+
Customers

23. Quick Demo

24. Help documentation to get a great search experience for free

25. –DocSearch,How? Our search-UI

26. –DocSearch,What?
Projects helped

27. 21
Help your favourite project, apply!
https://community.algolia.com/docsearch/

28. Let’s get hands-on

30. To the future - voice and image search demos

31. Thanks for having me!
Solutions Engineer (London, UK)
Aaron Stillwell