On 2/28/22 13:27, Srijan wrote:
The point I am debating is if I want to go the SolrCloud route or if I can still leverage the old way of performing distributed search using the shards parameter. Is the old distributed search even supported in newer Solr versions? Would you mind sharing your experience regarding distributed search if you have implemented one? What is your environment like and any pain points you might have encountered while supporting distributed search.
SolrCloud makes a lot of things easier. Because of the need for zookeeper, initial setup can have challenges that are not present if using standalone mode, but it's not super hard to set up.
When I first set up a distributed index on Solr 1.4.0, SolrCloud was just an idea that people were toying with ... it didn't land in an official release until version 4.0. So I figured out how to distribute data among multiple shards at index time and how to set up a special core/handler to do distributed queries. SolrCloud eliminates the need to do any of that. I no longer work for the company with that deployment. When I left it, it was running some 4.x release, 4.7 if I remember right, and it had not been migrated to cloud mode. If I was still working with that index, I would be taking steps to get it upgraded to a modern version, but I would likely NOT be switching to cloud mode yet.
Solr still supports doing all of it yourself without Cloud mode for typical use cases. A word of warning -- when entirely new features are implemented, they often target SolrCloud first, and using that feature on a server in standalone mode is not always guaranteed. At some point in the future, Solr might ALWAYS run in cloud mode, but that decision has not been made yet. Standalone mode is still very useful for me, and I think for many others.
Thanks, Shawn
