Behind the hype: managing billion-scale embeddings in Elasticsearch and OpenSearch
Amine Gani and Roudy Khoury • Location: Theater 7 • Back to Haystack 2025
“Semantic search is often hailed as a game-changer, promising to solve challenges like relevance, complex sentence analysis, and synonym detection with just a few embeddings and a machine learning model. The demos look impressive—but what happens when you’re dealing with more than a billion embeddings?
In this talk, we move past the hype to explore the real-world complexities of managing large-scale vector databases, focusing on Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. Through practical, hands-on examples, we’ll share proven strategies to ensure scalability, maintain high performance, and optimize costs. Whether you’re already managing a billion-vector database or preparing for large-scale deployment, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to tackle real-world challenges effectively.”
Amine Gani
AdeleanAmine Gani is a Software Engineer and Search Consultant at Adelean, where he specializes in building high-performance search solutions with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. With expertise in data indexing, search relevancy, and analytics, he helps clients optimize their e-commerce search engines and also A2, Adelean’s search solution for e-commerce. He works at the intersection of software engineering and information retrieval, ensuring integrations tailored to business needs.
Roudy Khoury
AdeleanRoudy holds a Masters in Artificial Intelligence. He joined Adelean as a software engineer and has been most interested in the areas of search and natural language processing. He has hands-on experience implementing Elasticsearch based search engine solutions in various sectors of activity. Roudy enjoys challenges and solving problems and has worked in a variety of industries.