Migrate to Typesense Cloud

[Mephistic]

Problems

We've dealt with a number of issues due to the complexities of our Typesense setup, namely:

• Bugs in updating collection definitions
• Lack of expertise in Typesense
• Most unique/complicated part of our stack
• Highest ongoing cost

In order to simplify our Typesense setup and reduce the operation cost of the search server, we should migrate from our custom Typesense setup to Typesense Cloud.

Success Criteria

• Create Typesense Cloud account
• Set up a search server with specs (1 GB RAM; 2 vCPUs, 4 hr burst per day; NO high availability; NO search delivery network; region of North Virginia)
  • This roughly mirrors the current configuration of our privately run Typesense server
  • Typesense Cloud's pricing estimate is that this will cost ~$30/month for a cluster - given that we run a DEV and PROD server, this is still a significant cost saving with a clear upgrade/scaling path should we get the funding for it.
• Reconfigure the Typesense Client to point to the new cloud cluster
  • The new configuration should be behind a toggleable flag for the initial rollout
• Re-index the existing search collections into Typesense Cloud
  • Should just be able to run the existing indexer job with the new client configuration
• Spin down the older cluster
• Update Typesense documentation on the MAPLE Github wiki

Additional Links

• Typesense Cloud Pricing: https://cloud.typesense.org/pricing/calculator?memory=1_gb&vcpu=2_vcpus_2_hr_burst_per_day&gpu=no&high_perf_disk=no&typesense_server_version=26.0&ha=no&sdn=off&regions=n_virginia
• Typesense Docs: https://typesense.org/docs/
  This may end up being enough work to split into multiple tickets - this is a bit of a brain dump.

[Mephistic]

We should aim to only commit to this work when we have the time and manpower to push it through to completion - running the old and new typesense clusters in parallel will obviously be more expensive than our current setup, so we should aim to spend as little time as possible in that state.