Sameer Maggon presented on using Apache Solr as the search engine for Sitecore implementations. He began with an overview of Solr and its advantages over Azure Search for large Sitecore sites. He then discussed different Solr topology options including standalone, master-slave, SolrCloud, and cross-data center replication. Maggon also covered how to architect production-grade Solr and Zookeeper installations along with backups and recovery processes. He concluded by promoting SearchStax as a way to get a production-ready Solr environment configured in just 30 minutes.

1. Sameer Maggon
Founder & Search Ninja
SearchStax, Inc.
May 17, 2019
World-class
Solr Power –
in 30 minutes

2. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
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Get you familiar with Apache Solr
Sitecore > Azure vs. Apache Solr
Overview & Comparison of Solr Topologies
Architecting a Production Grade Solr & Zookeeper
Backups and Recovery in Solr
Cross Region Solr deployment
Shameless Plug & Demo of SearchStax making it happen in 30 mins
Q&A
Agenda

3. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
About Me
Sameer Maggon
• University of Southern California Alum – Viterbi
Engineering School (Masters in Computer Science)
• Built platforms and teams for Enterprise Search and
Search-based Consumer companies.
• Spent 15+ years working with Open Source Search
Engines (started with Lucene 1.1)
• Currently Work at SearchStax, Inc. – Founded the
company in 2015 and primary focus is Product &
Technology
• Reach me @maggon or sameer@searchstax.com

4. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Sitecore and Azure Search
works great until you don’t
ask for much

5. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Sitecore > Azure Search vs. Apache Solr
Common Azure Search limitations as it relates to Sitecore
• High Frequency or Heavy Content Indexing Needs
• Performance Bottlenecks
• Large number of fields
• Multiple Languages
• Not Extensible – Lack of further customizability using
custom or community plugins (Content Extraction - PDF,
word, etc)
• As you scale up, cost increases drastically
• Not available in all regions – Does not meet Disaster
Recovery Compliance needs
• Feature gap
• Proprietary API

6. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Solr is the popular, blazing-
fast, open source enterprise
search platform built on
Apache Lucene

7. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
• Trusted by 90%+ Fortune 500 Companies
• True Open Source with Strong Community
• Massive Scalability – used by Salesforce, Walmart, Iron Mountain, etc.
• Feature Rich
• Faceted Search, Fuzzy Search, Spellcheck, Geospatial, Multi-language, and more.
• Auto-Complete / Search Suggest
• Content Extraction from Filetypes
• Highly Customizable to specific needs
• Customizable Relevance Models
• Machine Learning Support
About Solr

8. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Sitecore Integrates
natively with Apache Solr.
Good, Bad, Ugly

9. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Apache Solr is an open
source software that needs
to be setup, configured,
deployed, scaled and
optimized.
Good, Bad, Ugly

10. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
It’s on you to do it
yourself.
• Applies to Self-Managed or PaaS Sitecore
Offerings.
• Sitecore Managed Cloud Offering provides
Apache Solr as a Service.
Good, Bad, Ugly

11. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
Get you familiar with Apache Solr
Sitecore > Azure vs. Apache Solr
Overview & Comparison of Solr Topologies
Architecting a Production Grade Solr & Zookeeper
Backups and Recovery in Solr
Cross Region Solr deployment
Shameless Plug & Demo of SearchStax making it happen in 30 mins
Q&A
Agenda

12. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Solr Topologies
• Standalone/SolrCloud Server
• Master-Slave
• High Availability SolrCloud
• SolrCloud with CDCR (Cross Data Center Replication)

13. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Standalone Server or SolrCloud
• Zookeeper and Solr run on same server
• Ideal for Non-Production (Development
or QA Environments)
• Can be run in a “Cloud” mode or
“Standalone” mode
• No High Availability or Fault Tolerance

14. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Let’s take this Standalone
Server and make it Highly
Available

15. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
SolrCloud Journey to High Availability
• Zookeeper is single point of failure

16. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
SolrCloud Journey to High Availability
• In Cloud Environments, IPs can change
and nodes will go down or get
recycled.
• Don’t want your application to directly
be tied to the individual Solr nodes

17. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Solr Topologies: SolrCloud (High-Availability)
• High-Availability Zookeeper Ensemble
• High-Availability Solr Servers (with
replication)
• Load Balancer / App Gateway
• Ability to Scale up without re-
architecting

18. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
Get you familiar with Apache Solr
Sitecore > Azure vs. Apache Solr
Overview & Comparison of Solr Topologies
Architecting a Production Grade Solr & Zookeeper
Backups and Recovery in Solr
Cross Region Solr deployment
Shameless Plug & Demo of SearchStax making it happen in 30 mins
Q&A
Agenda

19. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Backups and Recovery: SolrCloud

20. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Backups and Recovery: SolrCloud
Shared filesystem,
mounted on all nodes Shared filesystem
• SolrCloud Backups requires shared
filesystem mounted on same path on all
nodes
• Sitecore developers responsibility or
implementation of:
• backup schedules
• retention logic and cleanup
• backup/restore verification procedures

21. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
Get you familiar with Apache Solr
Sitecore > Azure vs. Apache Solr
Overview & Comparison of Solr Topologies
Architecting a Production Grade Solr & Zookeeper
Backups and Recovery in Solr
Cross Region Solr deployment
Shameless Plug & Demo of SearchStax making it happen in 30 mins
Q&A
Agenda

22. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Solr Topologies: SolrCloud with CDCR
• Highly Resilient (Entire Data Center
can become unavailable without
impacting availability)
• Localized Traffic Routing is possible
• Can be scaled to multiple regions

23. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
There is an easier way

24. © 2001-2019 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
SearchStax Demo:
Pro-Grade Solr in 30
minutes

25. Thank you
FOR DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY.
Sitecore Confidential and Proprietary. ©2019 Sitecore
Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and
Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of
Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product
names are the property of their respective owners.