Alibaba Cloud Full Stack (9): OpenSearch and AI Search

Wed, 06 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I built my first search engine with Elasticsearch and a pile of synonyms. It took six months to get decent results. Every week, users complained about missing results, so I added more synonyms, broke something else, and added exception rules. The relevance tuning spreadsheet grew to 400 rows. I had custom analyzers for three languages, a boosting config that no one understood (including me), and a reindexing job that took four hours. Then I tried hybrid vector+keyword search on a side project and got better results on day one. Not marginally better — “users stopped complaining” better. That experience completely changed how I think about search, and it’s the reason this article exists.

Terraform for AI Agents (5): Storage — Vector, Relational, and Object Memory

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Most tutorials gloss over an agent’s memory. ‘Just put the embeddings in Pinecone, the sessions in Postgres, and the screenshots in S3.’ On Aliyun, all three are managed services. Correctly provisioning them with Terraform can mean the difference between a working memory and losing three weeks of conversation history because the disk filled up at 4 AM.

This article covers all three layers, their Terraform configurations, the critical but tedious backup and disaster recovery (DR) setup, the major version upgrade process, and the Saturday outage that changed how I do things.

OpenSearch on Chen Kai Blog

Alibaba Cloud Full Stack (9): OpenSearch and AI Search

Terraform for AI Agents (5): Storage — Vector, Relational, and Object Memory