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Self-Hosted Search Without the Self-Hosted Pain

· 4 min read
Allison Richardet
Allison Richardet
Lucenia Team

Enterprise search comes with a trade-off that most teams accept without questioning.

Managed services handle operations for you. But your data lives on someone else's infrastructure. Your costs scale on their terms. If you are in a regulated industry, running air-gapped environments, or just want to keep sensitive data on your own servers, data sovereignty is a requirement.

Self-hosted keeps you in control. Your data, your infrastructure, your security policies. Now deployment is your problem. AWS has one set of patterns, while Azure has another. On-prem introduces its own constraints. If you support multiple environments, you are maintaining separate configurations for each one.

We built Lucenia for teams who want the control without settling for painful deployment.

The Deployment Experience We're Building Toward​

Self-hosted software has a reputation: the power to choose and maintain exactly as you need, but operationally expensive as you scale across environments.

Multi-environment deployment management is difficult even for the best of software.

Each cloud provider has its own abstractions for compute, storage, networking and managed services. On-prem environments have their own constraints. If you are spread across cloud providers or running hybrid infrastructure, you end up maintaining parallel configurations. That is overhead that has nothing to do with search.

We think there is room to improve this.

Deploy to one environment? Straightforward. Deploy the same consistently to AWS, Azure, GCP, on-prem? This is where complexity compounds, and it shouldn't. The deployment experience should be fast, consistent, and reliable - regardless of where you are running. Your approach to deployment shouldn't settle for the common denominator; far from that, you need optimization for each deployment destination. This is where Tensor9 comes in.

Our Work with Tensor9​

We're working with Tensor9 to simplify multi-environment deployment.

Tensor9 builds tooling for deploying software across different environments from a single definition. You describe your infrastructure once. Their platform compiles it to target-specific configurations - translating cloud-managed services to their equivalents in each environment.

Already live: Tensor9 has added Lucenia to their platform. Organizations using Tensor9 to deploy software into customer environments can now include Lucenia as their search layer, with consistent deployment across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem.

What we're exploring: Using Tensor9's approach under the hood for Lucenia's own deployment tooling. The goal is to make it as easy to deploy Lucenia to Azure as it is to deploy to AWS - without the need to maintain environment-specific configurations.

This is the experience we are building toward. We will share updates as this collaboration develops.

What You Can Run Today​

Lucenia is a drop-in alternative to OpenSearch and Elasticsearch. Your existing queries work as-is. It is designed for AI workloads - vector search, hybrid queries, retrieval-augmented generation - while handling traditional search and analytics just as well.

Current Deployment Options:

  • Direct Download: Linux, macOS and Windows from our downloads page
  • Helm chart: For Kubernetes environments
  • AWS Marketplace: Optimized for deployment on AWS

Licensing happens through cloud.lucenia.io, but Lucenia itself runs on your infrastructure - AWS, GCP, Azure, on-prem, wherever you need it. Your Kubernetes cluster, your servers, your environment. You maintain full control over where your data lives and how your search infrastructure operates.

In Case You Missed It​

Learn more about Tensor9's approach to multi-environment deployment and the Lucenia integration:

Get Started​

Deploy Lucenia today. Downloads are available through our downloads page. Reference our documentation at docs.lucenia.io.

See it in action. On February 12, join Nick Knize from Lucenia and the Tensor9 team in a webinar where they discuss Lucenia, Tensor9 and multi-environment deployments.

Questions? If you have specific deployment requirements or want to talk about where we are headed, reach out. We are happy to discuss how we can help.