Welcome to Searchlight’s documentation!

The Searchlight project provides indexing and search capabilities across OpenStack resources. Its goal is to achieve high performance and flexible querying combined with near real-time indexing. It uses Elasticsearch, a real-time distributed indexing and search engine built on Apache Lucene, but adds OpenStack authentication and Role Based Access Control to provide appropriate protection of data.

Searchlight, as with all OpenStack projects, is written with the following design guidelines in mind:

  • Microservice based architecture: Quickly add new behaviors

  • Highly available: Scale to very serious workloads

  • Fault tolerant: Isolated processes avoid cascading failures

  • Recoverable: Failures should be easy to diagnose, debug, and rectify

  • Open standards: Be a reference implementation for a community-driven api

This documentation is generated by the Sphinx toolkit using tox -e docs and lives in the source tree.

Additional documentation on Searchlight can be found on the OpenStack wiki.