Search and navigation backend migrations

  • Updated
Description

Many clients encounter search issues because they still use an older backend infrastructure of Search & Navigation (formerly Episerver Find) hosted on AWS (Find V1). You can remedy many of these issues by migrating to the new search infrastructure hosted in Azure (Find v3).  This topic describes the improvements and how a migration is performed.

Steps

Advantages of the newer version of the backend infrastructure

  • Faster provisioning of additional capacity and new service clusters.
  • Better stability.
  • A newer version of Search & Navigation backend infrastructure has fewer bugs. See New Search & Navigation features and fixes (some client bugs were due to old infrastructure).

 

Migration Types

You can use an automated migration or perform a manual migration.

  • An automated migration moves indexed data, including search statistics and optimizations (such as synonyms, best bets, related queries and autocomplete entries). The automated migration requires at least Episerver.Find package version 13.4.5.
  • A manual migration requires Episerver.Find package version 12.0.0 to avoid unexpected issues.  The manual migration requires a full reindex and search optimizations must be backed up and imported into the new index.

Note: In both automated and manual migrations, you should back up the Find search optimizations using this tool. See Find optimizations export-import, blog by Sergii Vorushylo.

 

Upgrading considerations

 

How to upgrade Search & Navigation

Use the update-package NuGet command in Visual Studio:
update-package episerver.find

See Additional nuget info.

 

How to perform a migration

You can accomplish a manual or automated migration by sending an email to support@optimizely.com requesting a migration of indexes to Find v3.

 

More on migrations

See Search & Navigation Backend Migrations, blog by Elias Lundmark.