Solr on EC2

"Cloud computing" is all the rage recently, and Amazon's EC2 is one of the major players. The idea of spinning up a new instance of Solr in seconds to accomodate increased load is very attractive, especially as it can be done on demand, without heavy infrastructure investment. But how does that actually work?

This talk will (very) briefly outline creating a ready-to-deploy image containing a Solr instance. From there we'll discuss various the considerations to keep in mind when running Solr on EC2, including; replication concerns, monitoring and integration with CloudWatch, indexing, and cost.

We'll also explore Autoscaling; automatically increasing search capacity in response to the current load, and some of the issues that need to be considered when planning for autoscaling that are specific to Solr.

Finally, we'll consider the possibilities that EC2 offers in terms of answering the persistently difficult-to-answer question: "how many documents can I put on my server".

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