Hey Walter, I recently migrated our Solr cluster to Docker and am very pleased I did so. We run relativity large servers and run multiple Solr instances per physical host and having managed Solr upgrades on bare metal installs since Solr 5, containerisation has been a blessing (currently Solr 7.7.2). In our case we run 20 Solr nodes per host over 5 hosts totalling 100 Solr instances. Here I host 3 collections of varying size. The first contains 60m docs (8 shards), the second 360m (12 shards) , and the third 1.3b (30 shards) all with 2 NRT replicas. The docs are primarily database sourced but are not tiny by any means.
Here are some of my comments from our migration journey: - Running Solr on Docker should be no different to bare metal. You still need to test for your environment and conditions and follow the guides and best practices outlined in the excellent Lucidworks blog post https://lucidworks.com/post/sizing-hardware-in-the-abstract-why-we-dont-have-a-definitive-answer/. - The recent Solr Docker images are built with Java 11 so if you store your indexes in hdfs you'll have to build your own Docker image as Hadoop is not yet certified with Java 11 (or use an older Solr version image built with Java 8) - As Docker will be responsible for quite a few Solr nodes it becomes important to make sure the Docker daemon is configured in systemctl to restart after failure or reboot of the host. Additionally the Docker restart=always setting is useful for restarting failed containers automatically if a single container dies (i.e. JVM explosions). I've deliberately blown up the JVM in test conditions and found the containers/Solr recover really well under Docker. - I use Docker Compose to spin up our environment and it has been excellent for maintaining consistent settings across Solr nodes and hosts. Additionally using a .env file makes most of the Solr environment variables per node configurable in an external file. - I'd recommend Docker Swarm if you plan on running Solr over multiple physical hosts. Unfortunately we had an incompatible OS so I was unable to utilise this approach. The same incompatibility existed for K8s but Lucidworks has another great article on this approach if you're more fortunate with your environment than us https://lucidworks.com/post/running-solr-on-kubernetes-part-1/. - Our Solr instances are TLS secured and use the basic auth plugin and rules based authentication provider. There's nothing I have not been able to configure with the default Docker images using environment variables passed into the container. This makes upgrades to Solr versions really easy as you just need to grab the image and pass in your environment details to the container for any new Solr version. - If possible I'd start with the Solr 8 Docker image. The project underwent a large refactor to align it with the install script based on community feedback. If you start with an earlier version you'll need to refactor when you eventually move to Solr version 8. The Solr Docker page has more details on this. - Matijn Koster (the project lead) is excellent and very responsive to questions on the project page. Read through the q&a page before reaching out I found a lot of my questions already answered there. Additionally, he provides a number of example Docker configurations from command line parameters to docker-compose files running multiple instances and zookeeper quarums. - The Docker extra hosts parameter is useful for adding extra hosts to your containers hosts file particularly if you have multiple nic cards with internal and external interfaces and you want to force communication over a specific one. - We use the Solr Prometheus exporter to collect node metrics. I've found I've needed to reduce the metrics to collect as having this many nodes overwhelmed it occasionally. From memory it had something to do with concurrent modification of Future objects the collector users and it sometimes misses collection cycles. This is not Docker related but Solr size related and the exporter's ability to handle it. - We use the zkCli script a lot for updating configsets. As I did not want to have to copy them into a container to update them I just download a copy of the Solr binaries and use it entirely for this zookeeper script. It's not elegant but a number of our Dev's are not familiar with Docker and this was a nice compromise. Another alternative is to just use the rest API to do any configset manipulation. - We load balance all of these nodes to external clients using a haproxy Docker image. This combined with the Docker restart policy and Solr replication and autoscaling capabilities provides a very stable environment for us. All in all migrating and running Solr on Docker has been brilliant. It was primarily driven by a need to scale our environment vertically on large hardware instances as running 100 nodes on bare metal was too big a maintenance and administrative burden for us with a small Dev and support team. To date it's been very stable and reliable so I would recommend the approach if you are in a similar situation. Thanks, Dwane ________________________________ From: Walter Underwood <wun...@wunderwood.org> Sent: Saturday, 14 December 2019 6:04 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org <solr-user@lucene.apache.org> Subject: Solr Cloud on Docker? Does anyone have experience running a big Solr Cloud cluster on Docker containers? By “big”, I mean 35 million docs, 40 nodes, 8 shards, with 36 CPU instances. We are running version 6.6.2 right now, but could upgrade. If people have specific things to do or avoid, I’d really appreciate it. I got a couple of responses on the Slack channel, but I’d love more stories from the trenches. This is a direction for our company architecture. We have a master/slave cluster (Solr 4.10.4) that is awesome. I can absolutely see running the slaves as containers. For Solr Cloud? Makes me nervous. wunder Walter Underwood wun...@wunderwood.org http://observer.wunderwood.org/ (my blog)