Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrampage | Hacker News Reader

We use SolrCloud cluster where I work. The initial setup is rather daunting and involves reading up on Zookeeper, and Solr terminology on Collections, Cores, Shards and Nodes. But once the reading is done, clustering is effortless to execute. Solr 5 and 6 have a robust REST API for managing Collections.

The new SQL / Parallel Streaming has also made querying multiple collections a cinch.

View on HN

What's daunting about running Zookeeper?

Most of the problems that I have had are with the ZK clients and not the server. As long as you follow the operational documentation (there are a few basic rules) it hums along nicely. We have a few clusters with Kafka and have a decent process in Chef:

https://github.com/bloomberg/zookeeper-cookbook

Compared to ES documentation on clustering it's a lot of work. ES merely requires a seed host to connect to and will gossip the rest of the cluster. No external service needed.

On the other hand, it's had its share of improperly handled split brain scenarios. I still think it has problems with partial split brain (where A and B can't talk, but C can talk to both of them).

Because I'd rather run Consul?

Zookeeper as a hard requirement feels like asking me to supply an entire container port to unload one container from a semi-trailer.

I may not have phrased it correctly. It was daunting to setup the first time as I had no idea (then) about running clusters. Most people graduate from running a single Solr Node to a (generally) 3 node cluster. Getting a running Zookeeper ensemble is just part of that process.

Thanks for sharing the cookbook :) . Do you use Zookeeper for anything other than Kafka?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com