This document summarizes a customer webinar about Bio-Techne's multi-site e-commerce solution powered by Drupal and Apache Solr. It discusses how Bio-Techne grew from a single brand with 350k SKUs to a larger company with 12 brands, 1.5M SKUs, and a need for a scalable search platform. Bio-Techne partnered with SearchStax to build out their Solr infrastructure. Key aspects of their new architecture include consolidating Solr schemas, CI/CD processes to deploy updates, and integrating Drupal and other systems to Solr for real-time product updates. Monitoring is done using New Relic to oversee performance of the full web ecosystem.

1. May 18, 2018
Customer Webinar:
Building & Managing a Million Record
Catalog
Multi-Site, Apache Solr Powered Drupal E-Commerce Solution
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2. A little about our speakers today…
• Pete Samland – Senior Manager Product Systems & Development
Operations, Bio-Techne
Spends the majority of his time running the information team at Bio-Techne. The team is
responsible for moving all of the product and financial data around the globe. The team
manages all of the cloud infrastructure and application monitoring. Outside of work he
enjoys heading to the mountains with his family and skiing in the winter and camping in the
summer.
• Dustin Poage - System Developer, Bio-Techne
Employs a strong passion for connecting systems and people with the proper technology.
He has spent the last 4 years connecting Drupal with custom .Net applications (is that even
possible?!?) that maintain Drupal database records for eCommerce, search utilizing Apache
Solr, and has containerized it all. Outside of work he enjoys taking his family outdoors off-
roading, fishing and camping in the Rockies.
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3. Where We Started
• One entity
•Novus Biologicals
•OEM sales model
•Large product catalog for the
company size (350k SKUs)
•60 employees, 20M annual
revenue, 3 global locations
• One website
• Limited but known product lines
• Limited resources (still the case)
• Controlled growth
• One application to rule them all
(the monolith)
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4. Where We Landed
• Bio-Techne
•5 brands
•~1000 employees
•~15 locations globally
•~600K SKUs
•~350M annual revenue
• We have a significantly
larger company that
acquired us for our
product catalog and IT
skills
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5. Where We Really Landed
• No clear digital path when we were acquired
• About 10 employees in all of IT
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6. We have the technology, the team and the
vision….
• And a really cool monolith that does what it does for one
brand and set of products really well.
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7. How are we really going to survive?
• Current Solr landscape
• Curl-ing flat files
• Custom Product Information Management application
• Static product pages
• Complicated proxy architecture
• Single Instance for Dev, Stage and Prod (Doin’ it Live!)
• The plan
• Build product pages from Solr
• CI deployments and actual testing
• Consolidate schema’s
• Atomic updates
• Message based architecture
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8. Need a Solr Platform for a Growing Team
• Partnered with SearchStax because of their
• Robust platform
• A Flexible, Scalable, and Reliable PaaS
• SLA
• Cost effective
• Ease of access, manageability, logistics and monitoring
with notifications
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9. Architecture Map
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10. Architecture Map
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11. Architecture Map
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12. CI/CD Process
• Jenkins
• Script Jenkins to create replica base images of the production and
staging sites including databases and code branches
• These are then run internally set to collections with Schema changes
• Once QA and UAT pass, these changes are shipped to Solr and
collections reloaded.
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13. CI/CD
• Visual Studio Online – Currently under development
• Message based publishing and subscribing
• On premise databases publish out changes to products to an Azure
queue
• Application running within an Azure Kubernetes Service subscribes to
the Azure queue and then maps an updates the document in the
appropriate collection
• Allows the integration of product information updates in real time to
Solr
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14. CI/CD
• Development and Staging Sites
• Gives the end user (Marketing) the ability to select fields and apply
boosts to test changes with the site search
• Allows segregation of development between web and search ensuring
that changes can or cannot proceed
• Each site has a set of copyField’s that are specific to how they would
like to be searched
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15. Schema Consolidation
• Initially started with one Solr Schema for NovusBio
• After acquisition additional custom Solr Schemas were created
• Difficult to manage
• Who uses which fields?
• What do these each mean?
• More confusing for end users to test and change boost’s!
• Confusion between brands and what fields mean what for developers!
• Our new plan is to Merge all Solr Schema’s
• Field Types – created specific fieldTypes for each entity to use for
search
• Fields – created specific fields for each entity to search with, agreed
upon all entity in regards to what standard fields meant
• Result of this consolidation is yielding more flexible search fields and a
standardization for onboarding!
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16. Drupal (or Any CMS/MVC Platform)
• Front End for each Brand
• Highly customizable and templated
• Standardized data points
• Highly data driven with less confusion for development
• Creates collaboration for brand marketing
• Enables the end user to be confident
• Back End
• Standardized data points
• Flexibility to share field types and fields between brands
• Single point of reference for all sites
• Live updates to Solr from individual source systems
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17. Monitoring and Performance
• New Relic is used to monitor the full web ecosystem
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18. Monitoring and Performance
• Leverage the Solr plugin to get the data into New Relic and consolidate
monitoring
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19. Where We Are Now
• 12 Brands currently
• 1900+ employees
• 22 locations globally
• 1.5M distinct SKUs
• Around 700M in annual revenue
• 60+ employees in the IT department
• There is a clear path forward
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20. Thank you for your attention!
Questions and Answers
Bing Gin
bing@searchstax.com