Azure Cognitive SearchAzure Cognitive Search
Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development
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Offered in combinable units that include reliable storage and throughput, Azure Cognitive Search allows developers to set-up and scale a search experience quickly and cost-effectively. As the volume of data or throughput needs of an application change, Azure Cognitive Search can scale out to meet these needs, and then scale back down to reduce costs. To get more performance, a customer can combine units to gain more queries per second, or a higher document count, or both. Units can also be combined to enable high availability or faster data ingestion.
High density (HD) mode is an optional setting available for standard S3. High density mode enables customers to pack in a higher number of indices per Azure Cognitive Search service. This is ideal for customers building multi-tenant SaaS apps that have a large number of small tenants, trials, or free accounts and want to provide a powerful search experience at a low cost per index.
You can enrich a limited number of documents for free, or attach a billable Cognitive Services resource for larger and more frequent workloads. Built-in cognitive skill execution is charged at the Cognitive Services Pricing Page, at the same rate as if you had performed the task directly. Learn more about skill execution.
Pricing Details
| FREE | BASIC | STANDARD S1 | STANDARD S2 | STANDARD S3 | Storage Optimized L1 | Storage Optimized L2 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storage | 50 MB | 2 GB | 25 GB (max 300 GB per service) | 100 GB (max 1 TB per service) | 200 GB (max 2 TB per service) | 1 TB (max 12 TB per service) |
2 TB (max 24 TB per service) |
| Max indexes per service | 3 | 15 | 50 | 200 | 200 or 1000/partition in high density1 mode | 10 | 10 |
| Scale out limits | N/A | Up to 3 units per service (max 1 partition; max 3 replicas) | Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) | Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) | Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) up to 12 replicas in high density1 mode | Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) | Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) up to 12 replicas in high density1 mode |
| Price per unit | Free | ￥1.03/hour | ￥3.42/hour | ￥13.68/hour | ￥27.35 /hour | ￥39.072/hour | ￥78.138/hour |
| FREE | BASIC | STANDARD S1 | STANDARD S2 | STANDARD S3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storage | 50 MB | 2 GB | 25 GB (max 300 GB per service) | 100 GB (max 1 TB per service) | 200 GB (max 2 TB per service) |
| Max indexes per service | 3 | 15 | 50 | 200 | 200 or 1000/partition in high density1 mode |
| Scale out limits | N/A | Up to 3 units per service (max 1 partition; max 3 replicas) | Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) | Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) | Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) up to 12 replicas in high density1 mode |
| Price per unit | Free | ￥1.03/hour | ￥3.42/hour | ￥13.68/hour | ￥27.35 /hour |
1 High density (HD) mode is an option available within the standard S3 service that allows a larger number of indexes to be created in a single service. Using HD mode, a service can create up to 1,000 indexes/partition, where an index may be no more than 1 million documents (or 2 GB storage), and the total number of documents and storage across all indexes may not exceed 120 million documents/partition or 200 GB/partition.
Learn more about service limits and constraints.
Additional Azure Cognitive Search Features (Billed Separately)
| What This Feature Does | Pricing Details | |
|---|---|---|
| Custom Entity Lookup Skill | Looks for text from a custom, user-defined list of words and phrases and labels all documents containing matching entities. Available for all Basic, Standard, and Storage-Optimized tiers. When to use: you want to define and detect specific entities in your data. |
0-1M text records ￥10.176 per 1,000 text records 1M-3M text records ￥7.632 per 1,000 text records 3M-10M text records ￥3.0528 per 1,000 text records 10M+ text records ￥2.544 per 1,000 text records |
| Custom Entity Lookup Skill | Extracts content from a file within the enrichment pipeline. Text extraction is free. Image extraction is billed during the initial document cracking step and when invoking the Document Extraction skill. When to use: you have documents that contain images. |
0-1M images ￥10.18 per 1,000 transactions 1M-5M images ￥8.14 per 1,000 transactions 5M+ images ￥6.61 per 1,000 transactions |
FAQ
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How does the usage of a standard unit show up on my bill?
With Azure Cognitive Search, you are billed on a flat, predictable hourly rate based on the number of units that have been used during any given hour.
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If I scale up or scale down my service, what will I be charged?
You are billed the maximum number of search units provisioned during any hour. If you start with two units, then scale to four units, and then scale back down to two units all within an hour, you will be charged for four units.
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If I click the “stop” button in the Azure portal, will I still be charged?
The stop button is meant to stop traffic to your service instance. As a result, your service is still running and will continue to be charged the hourly rate.
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What if my unit is active for less than an hour?
You are billed the flat rate for each hour the unit exists, regardless of usage or if the unit is active for less than an hour. For example, if you create a unit and delete it five minutes later, your bill will reflect a charge for one unit hour.
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What if I need more throughput or more storage?
Azure Cognitive Search units combine to provide additional throughput and storage. For example, to scale from 15 million documents to 30 million (additional partitions), a customer can purchase two units. To increase throughput (additional replicas), they can purchase two units. To increase both storage and throughput, a customer would need to purchase four units (2 replicas x 2 partitions = 4 search units).
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What are the differences among the editions offered by Azure Cognitive Search?
Free is a free version of Azure Cognitive Search designed to provide developers a sandbox to test features and implementations of Azure Cognitive Search. It is not designed for production workloads. Basic, standard, and storage optimized are the go-to options for building applications that benefit from a self-managed search-as-a-service solution. Standard delivers storage and predictable throughput that scales with application needs.
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How do I create an Azure Cognitive Search account?
Azure Cognitive Search is available in the new Azure Portal. First, you must sign up for an Azure subscription, then you can add an Azure Cognitive Search account to your Azure subscription via the gallery in the preview portal. Get more information.
Support & SLA
If you have any questions or need help, please visitAzure Support and select self-help service or any other method to contact us for support.
We guarantee that apps running in a customer subscription will be available 99.95% of the time. No Service Level Agreement is offered for the Free or Shared tiers. To learn more about the details of our Service Level Agreement, please visit the , please visit theService Level Agreements page.