Amazon Web Services offers a quick and easy way to build a scalable search platform, a flexibility is especially useful when an initial data load is required but the hardware is no longer needed for day-to-day searching and adding new documents. This presentation will cover one such approach capable of enlisting hundreds of worker nodes to ingest data, track their progress, and relinquish them back to the cloud when the job is done. The data set that will be discussed is the collection of published patent grants available through Google Patents. A single Solr instance can easily handle searching the roughly 1 million patents issued between 2010 and 2005, but up to 50 worker nodes were necessary to load that data in a reasonable amount of time. Also, the same basic approach was used to make three sizes of PNG thumbnails of the patent grant TIFF images. In that case 150 worker nodes were used to generate 1.6 Tb of data over the course of three days. In this session, attendees will learn how to leverage EC2 as a scalable indexer and tricks for using XSLT on very large XML documents.

1. Indexing Big Data in the Cloud

2. Me
Scott Stults
Co-Founder of OpenSource Connections
Solr / Lucene
Bash / Python / Java
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3. Eric
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4. Big Data
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5. Big Data Wrangler
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6. How?
Address a Real Project
Be Agile
Make Small Mistaeks Fast
Succeed BIG
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7. USPTO Goals
Prototype Search UX
Prove Solr:
Scales
Integrates
Excels
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8. Scale?
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9. Our Approach
KISS
YAGNI
(This space intentionally left blank)
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10. Minimal Flair
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11. Record Everything!
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12. Some Numbers
Doc Count 1.1 Million
Zip Files 313
Docs per Zip File 4,000
Zip File Size 75M
File Size 300M
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13. Testing
Start some servers
Process a batch
Check the clock
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14. start_nodes
start_nodes() {
ec2-run-instances ami-1b814f72
--block-device-mapping '/dev/sdb=snap-48adde35::true'
--block-device-mapping '/dev/sdi1=:10:false'
--block-device-mapping '/dev/sdi2=:10:false'
--block-device-mapping '/dev/sdi3=:20:false'
--instance-type m1.large
--key uspto-proto
--instance-count $MAX_NODES
--group default > ~/run-output
}
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15. Gut Check
How fast can we do this?
What can we do in parallel?
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16. Scaling
Raise our instance limit
xargs -P GNU parallel
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17. Shortcomings
SSH?
Error recovery
One Solr
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18. Alternatives
CloudFormation
Puppet / Chef
Multiple Cores / Shards
Hadoop
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19. Success
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20. Victory Lap
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21. Instances / Time
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22. Thank You
https://github.com/sstults/patent-indexing
@scottstults
#o19s
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