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Introducing: A search & relevancy assessment from engineers, not theorists. Learn more

Your AI-Powered Search Journey Starts with Bonsai.io

Getting started with AI-powered search? Bonsai makes it easy. We handle the complexity behind-the-scenes, so you can focus on innovation.

AI powered Search book cover image, by Trey Grainger, Doug Turnbull, Max Irwin copyright 2025 by Manning Publications Co.

Get Started With a Free OpenSearch Bonsai.io Sandbox Cluster

Our platform offers fully managed OpenSearch clusters, comprehensive tooling, and expert support to help you succeed. You get one to use with the AI Powered Search book, and for whatever else you can think of, for free!

  1. Sign up for an account at bonsai.io.
  2. Verify your email.
  3. Set up your cluster!

Why do our Free Sandbox OpenSearch and Elasticsearch clusters have 3 nodes?

All of our production clusters are composed of a minimum of three servers, running in redundant data centers (AWS Availability Zones).
Even the free ones.

Once you click, "Provision Cluster," we'll get to work provisioning your highly available, 3 node, availability-zone distributed (different data centers) sandbox cluster. For free. For ever.

When it's ready to grow, we'll send you an email confirmation with some tips on how to get the most out of your search cluster.

Access Your Bonsai.io Sandbox Cluster, Programmatically

Once your Bonsai sandbox cluster is created, head over to your Clusters Home and click into the sandbox cluster's name ("AI Powered Search + Bonsai!!!" below) to get to the Bonsai Cluster Dashboard

Here, you'll find details about the cluster's resource usage over time and point-in-time usage and performance metrics like shard distribution, data utilization, documents included, request count, query time (median and 95 percentile), and much more:

Clicking on the "Credentials" link in the sidebar, you'll be able to access your cluster's credentials (Access Key and Access Secret), which will be the username and password used to connect remotely to the cluster:

Connecting to your Bonsai OpenSearch Cluster from a Jupyter Notebook

If you're using Jupyter Lab to run your Jupyter Notebook code, there are generally two ways to provide access to your cluster.

  1. Paste the URL directly into your Jupyter Notebook, which comes with potential security issues when the code is inevitably pushed to your, say, version control system. Or,
  2. Set an environment variable with value of your cluster URL, say, OPENSEARCH_URL prior to launching your Jupyter Lab environment. More details on how that works at the JupyterLab Desktop User Guide.

Next Steps

Have questions, or ready to dive deeper and build even more intelligent search experiences? Get in touch or or email us at [email protected]!

Find out how we can help you.

Schedule a free consultation to see how we can create a customized plan to meet your search needs.