A Collection is simply the "SolrCloud" way of thinking about a logical index that incorporates shards, replication factors changing topology of where the replicas live and the like. In your case it's synonymous with your core (master and slaves). Since there's no master or slave role in SolrCloud, it's a little confusing (Leaders and replicas/followers roles can change in SolrCloud).
bq: Anyhow, the bottom line appears to be that 130Mb of jars are needed to deploy my configuration to Zookeeper bq: I don't want production machines to require VCS checkout credentials Huh? I think you're confusing deployment tools with how Zookeeper is used in SolrCloud. Zookeeper has two major functions: 1> store the conf directory (schema.xml, solrconfig.xml and the like), plus occasionally custom jars and make these automatically available to all Solr nodes in the cluster. It does NOT store the whole Solr deployment. 2> be aware of all Solr nodes in the system and notify all the other Solr nodes when instances go up and down. Zookeeper was never intended to hold all of Solr and take the place of puppet or chef. It will not automatically provision a new bare-metal node with a working Solr etc. Especially the VCS comment. _Some_ node somewhere has to be VCS conversant. But once that machine pushes config files to Zookeeper, they're then automagically available to all the Solr nodes in the collection, the Solr nodes need to know nothing about your VCS system. Anyway, if you're happy with your current setup go ahead and continue to use it. Just be clear what Zookeeper is intended to solve and what it isn't. It's perfectly compatible with Puppet, Chef and the like Best, Erick On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 4:46 PM, Aristedes Maniatis <a...@ish.com.au> wrote: > Thanks so much for your reply. That's clarified a few things for me. > > Erick Erickson wrote: > >> Where SolrCloud becomes compelling is when you _do_ need to have >> shard, and deal with HA/DR. > > I'm not using shards since the indicies are small enough, however I use > master/slave with 6 nodes for two reasons: having a single master poll the > database means less load on the database than have every node poll > separately. And of course we still want HA and performance, so we balance > load with haproxy. > >> Then the added step of maintaining things >> in Zookeeper is a small price to pay for _not_ having to be sure that >> all the configs on all the servers are all the same. Imagine a cluster >> with several hundred replicas out there. Being absolutely sure that >> all of them have the same configs, have been restarted and the like >> becomes daunting. So having to do an "upconfig" is a good tradeoff >> IMO. > > Saltstack (and ansible, puppet, chef, etc) all make distributed configuration > management trivial. So it isn't solving any problem for me, but I understand > how people without a configuration management tool would like it. > > > >> The bin/solr script has a "zk -upconfig" parameter that'll take care >> of pushing the configs up. Since you already have the configs in VCS, >> your process is just to pull them from vcs to "somewhere" then >> bin/solr zk -upconfig -z zookeeper_asserss -n configset_name -d >> directory_you_downloaded_to_from_VCS. > > Yep, I guess that's confirming my guess at how people are expected to use > this. Its pretty cumbersome for me because: > > 1. I don't want production machines to require VCS checkout credentials > 2. I don't want to have to install Solr (and keep the version in sync with > production) on our build or configuration management machines > 3. I still need files on disk in order to version control them and tie that > into our QA processes. Now I need another step to take those files and inject > them into the Zookeeper black box, ensuring they are always up to date. > > I do understand that people who managed hundreds of nodes completely by hand > would find it useful. But I am surprised that there were any of those people. > > I was hoping that Zookeeper had some hidden features that would make my life > easier. > > >> Thereafter you simply refer to them by name when you create a >> collection and the rest of it is automatic. Every time a core reloads >> it gets the new configs. >> >> If you're trying to manipulate _cores_, that may be where you're going >> wrong. Think of them as _collections_. What's not clear from your >> problem statement is whether these cores on the various machines are >> part of the same collection or not. > > I was unaware of the concept of collection until now. We use one core for > each type of entity we are indexing and that works well. > >> Do you have multiple shards in one >> logical index? > > No shards. Every Solr node contains the complete set of all data. > >> Or do you have multiple collections that have >> masters/slaves (in which case the master and all the slaves that point >> to it will be a "collection")? > > I'm not understanding from https://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrTerminology what > a Collection is, that makes it different to the old concept of Core. > > >> Do all of the cores you have use the >> same configurations? Or is each set of master/slaves using a different >> configuration? > > Each core has a different configuration (which is what makes it a different > core... different source data, different synonyms, etc). But every node is > identical and kept that way with saltstack. > > > > Anyhow, the bottom line appears to be that 130Mb of jars are needed to deploy > my configuration to Zookeeper. In that case, I think I'll do it by building a > new deployment project, with a gradle task (so I don't need to worry about > all those Solr dependencies for zksh), and a Jenkins job that can be > triggered to run the deployment to either staging or production. A few new > holes in my firewall and I'll be done. > > Unfortunate new points of failure and complexity, but I can't think of > anything simpler. > > > Thanks > > Ari > > > > -- > --------------------------> > Aristedes Maniatis > CEO, ish > https://www.ish.com.au > GPG fingerprint CBFB 84B4 738D 4E87 5E5C 5EFA EF6A 7D2E 3E49 102A >
