Search Indexing Service  ·  View 01 of 21  ·  Context and scope

System Context

Who searches, who publishes, which systems of record feed the index, and what the platform declines to own.

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Systems of record (owned elsewhere) Inventory Service DynamoDB Catalogue Service Aurora PostgreSQL Merchant Service People Consumer 40 M MAU Merchant 180 k active Search Engineer Platform SRE Consuming products Mobile & Web Apps Discovery & Feeds Merchant Console Search Indexing Service Index lifecycle + query Platform dependencies Enrichment Services categorise, geocode, score IAM & KMS Observability CloudWatch, Grafana searches edits listings tunes relevance reindex, rollback stock stream push query API query API own-listing search best-effort identity, keys signals Search Indexing Service — System Context External / third party Person or role Security / platform synchronous event / async failure / alternate Out of scope: the search UI, semantic/embedding retrieval, the systems of record, the analytics warehouse. v 1.0 · owner Data Platform Architecture · date 2026-10

Decisions

  • The platform holds no authoritative copy of any business entity. Sources stay with their owners; the index is a projection.
  • Four source systems, two with native change streams and two pushing changes through a signed API — the push path is the weakest supported case and is labelled as such.
  • Enrichment is a dependency the platform is allowed to lose: the edge is drawn as a failure-tolerant call, not a requirement.
  • Consuming products reach the index only through the query API, and only ever through an alias.

Deliberately out of scope

  • The product's own search UI and ranking surfaces.
  • Semantic retrieval and the embedding pipeline — a separate use case with its own index contract.
  • The systems of record, and the analytics warehouse that also reads them.

Assumptions

  • 40 million monthly active consumers, 180,000 active merchants, 12 product tenants, 80 million live documents.
  • Sources can emit a daily full snapshot to object storage; two of the four cannot emit a change stream at all.
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Amazon Web Services · Data Platform Architecture · 2026-1001-system-context