Thanks Erick, after looking further into Solr's source code, I see that it's married to ZK libraries and it won't be possible to extend existing code without diverting from the trunk. At the same time, I don't see any reason for lack of abstraction in cloud-related code of Solr and SolrJ. As far as I can see Consul provides all that SolrCloud needs and so if cloud code was using some more abstraction, ZK bindings could be substituted with another library. I am willing to implement a this functionality and the abstraction, but at the same time, I don't want to maintain my own branch of Solr because of this integration. Do you think it would be possible to add an abstraction layer to Solr source code in near future?
I think Consul has all the features that SolrCloud needs and what's especially attractive about Consul is that it's memory footprint is 100X smaller than ZK. Mainly though, we are considering Consul as a main service locator for a bunch of other moving parts within Zimbra, so being able to avoid deploying ZK just for SolrCloud would save a bunch of $$ for large customers. Thanks, Greg ----- Original Message ----- From: "Erick Erickson" <erickerick...@gmail.com> To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Sent: Friday, October 31, 2014 5:15:09 PM Subject: Re: Consul instead of ZooKeeper anyone? Not that I know of, but.... look before you leap. I took a quick look at Consul and it really doesn't look like any kind of drop-in replacement. Also, the Zookeeper usage in SolrCloud isn't really pluggable AFAIK, so there'll be lots of places in the Solr code that need to be reworked etc., especially in the realm of collections and sharding. The Collections API will be challenging to port over I think. Not to mention SolrJ and CloudSolrServer for clients who want to interact with SolrCloud through Java. Not saying it won't work, I just suspect that getting it done would be a big job, and thereafter keeping those changes in sync with the changing SolrCloud code base would chew up a lots of time. So if I were putting my Product Manager hat on I'd ask "is the benefit worth the effort?". All that said, go for it if you've a mind to! Best, Erick On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Greg Solovyev <g...@zimbra.com> wrote: > I am investigating a project to make SolrCloud run on Consul instead of > ZooKeeper. So far, my research revealed no such efforts, but I wanted to > check with this list to make sure I am not going to be reinventing the wheel. > Have anyone attempted using Consul instead of ZK to coordinate SolrCloud > nodes? > > Thanks, > Greg
