Welcome to our Ask the Expert session on Externalizing Search Service

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Session dates: 23 June - 27 June

Session opens to questions on 23 June!

Meet Your Expert(s):

Srinivas Reddy is a Senior Architect with 18 years of experience in designing, developing, and delivering enterprise applications across financial, banking, reinsurance, and commerce domains. Proven track record in leading global teams across on-site and offshore models, with deep expertise in microservices, enterprise architecture, and mission-critical systems. For the past three years, he has been part of the Search and Reporting team at Pega. As a lead architect within Pega's Search and Reporting Service (SRS), he drives the design and delivery of scalable, cloud-native and on-premise search solutions that power real-time insights across the Pega platform. Provide technical leadership across teams to implement high-performance indexing and retrieval pipelines using OpenSearch and Elasticsearch, ensuring robust search relevance, fault tolerance, and seamless integration with enterprise reporting workloads.

Ravi Teja Meka is a Senior Principal Software Engineer with 11 years of experience in designing and developing enterprise-grade software solutions, with a strong focus on search technologies and distributed systems. He has deep expertise in Elasticsearch, having worked with the platform since version 2.x, and a proven track record of building and maintaining scalable, fault-tolerant search infrastructures.

Since the inception of Pega's Search Service (SRS), he has been a core member of the development team and currently serves as the service owner, driving the evolution of search capabilities across the Pega platform. His responsibilities span the architecture, scaling, and operational management of Elasticsearch clusters, ensuring high availability and optimal performance in both cloud-native and on-premise environments.

Prior to joining Pega, he contributed to the development of advanced reporting solutions using Elasticsearch, with a strong interest in database internals, query optimization, and system scalability. He also brings specialized experience in NLP analysis and scripting within Elasticsearch, enhancing search relevance and analytical capabilities across complex data sets.

Message from Your Expert(s):

Transitioning from embedded search to Pega’s externalized Search and Reporting Service (SRS) enhances scalability, resilience, and performance in enterprise deployments. SRS offloads search workloads from the Pega runtime, enabling independent scaling of search infrastructure to meet growing data and user demands. It supports modern, cloud-native technologies like OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, enhancing operational flexibility and observability. By decoupling search from the application node, SRS enables better fault isolation, faster search indexing, and improved uptime. This shift aligns with microservices and containerized deployment strategies, making it ideal for both on-premise and cloud-native environments.

The externalization process is designed for zero-downtime migration, starting with Pega Platform version 8.7. This allows systems to continue operating uninterrupted during the transition. The migration works in the background, ensuring that the dataset from embedded Elasticsearch becomes instantaneously available in SRS without affecting users' ongoing work, such as making search queries or managing queue processors. When the migration finishes, the interface of the search landing page changes to reflect the SRS functionalities, such as improved indexing options.

It's important to note that starting from Pega Platform version 24.2, embedded Elasticsearch is no longer supported, and only externalized search configurations are supported. Therefore, organizations should plan to externalize search services to maintain compatibility and leverage the benefits of SRS.

So, you may ask any question around Search Externalization and questions around SRS - Deployments, Configuration, and Usage.

Ask the Expert Rules

• Follow the Pega Support Center's Rules of Engagement
• This is not a Live Chat - Srinivas & Ravi will reply to your questions over the course of the session 
• Questions should be clearly and succinctly expressed
• Questions should be of interest to many others in the audience
• Have fun!