Apache Big Data Europe 2016

Running a managed Solr service brings fun challenges with it, to both the users and the service itself. Users typically do not have access to all components of the Solr system (e.g. the ZK ensemble, the actual nodes that Solr runs on etc.). On the other hand the service must ensure high-availability at all times, and handle what is often user-driven tasks such as version upgrades, taking nodes offline for maintenance and more.



In this talk I will describe how we tackle these challenges to build a managed Solr service on the cloud, which currently hosts few thousands of Solr clusters. I will focus on the infrastructure that we chose to run the Solr clusters on, as well how we ensure high-availability, cluster balancing and version upgrades.