Episode 1 – To adventure or not to adventure

A blog series about Sitecore and Solr Cloud

How to setup Solr Cloud to work with Sitecore SXA using an XP license

1. To adventure or not to adventure
2. What is Solr Cloud
3. How to setup Solr cloud (To be released 2019-09-11)
4. How to configure Sitecore SXA to make use of Solr Cloud for an enterprise environment (To be released 2019-09-11) )

On different occasions with different people on National Sitecore User Groups, I did the talk “To adventure or not to adventure” about our experience in Setting up Solr Cloud to work with Sitecore SXA using an XP license.

On the SUG Netherlands, I did the talk together with Christophe Cremault from Searchstax. For the SUG Belgium/Luxemburg and a Webinar for SUG Bangalore India, I did the talk together with Cognizant Sitecore Architect Yogendra Puttamreddy.

In a talk, there is only a limited amount of time. Therefore I decided to write a blog series about it. The first episode is more or less a summarization of the talk. In the next series I will more and more deep dive into the technical part of the subject. The goal of this blog post is to share the experience and help colleagues

The almost autobiographical customer case was “Build an intranet application for a multinational company using Sitecore SXA. Use Solr Cloud as the Enterprise Search solution”

• The intranet has to be globally available
• Support is  needed for possible 20 + languages
• An intranet is for employees that seek information. Search is one of the most important features. Indexing needs to be done for all Sitecore content, many document types in different versions like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel but also media like JPG and more

It must be clear that a search solution for such an environment must be robust, maintainable and expandable.

This talk was not about a showing of how good we are (Yes we are!)

The talks were about the experience that comes to the table for an architect when you have to set up an environment like this. It is a responsible job and we want to help our customers in the best possible way. For the outside world, it might seem that an architect has all possible knowledge. Of course, this is not true. The task of an architect is to gather information and then design a plan that offers the customer a solution that really works

In the talks, we highlighted some technical items. We had to setup Solr Cloud for Sitecore 9.1 update 2. The web application was built using Sitecore SXA.  I talked about the process.

The options of Solr Cloud are immense. Solr Cloud is very new to Sitecore. Eventually, we first created a template from which we created the Virtual Machines that completely were ready to serve as a Solr Cloud Server Node. In the future when more nodes need to be created we only need to create new virtual machines based on the template. Really only a few lines of code need to be changed. After that, we can fire up the machine and it will automatically join the other Solr Cloud Nodes.

So maintenance tasks as scaling out, disaster recovery, monitoring, logging and everything you expect from a robust environment was taken care of.

Because we had the environment reviewed by an experienced Solr Consultant we are sure that all possible needed changes in the Solr environment can be done. That was the goal. Create a robust and future proof environment for the customer.

There were two things I was not so happy about. The first one was that we created IAAS elements in a beautiful PAAS environment. The second one was that setting up the Solr environment took us too long.

Sitecore

I believe it is impossible for a vendor like Sitecore to do this without creating some bugs. What it makes even more difficult is that the build cycle of Sitecore SXA is not completely in line with Sitecore itself. This philosophy of Sitecore is a very logical one. However, this implicates that when using Sitecore SXA problems occur that do not appear when working with Classical Sitecore. We had to overcome these problems. Read more about this in blogpost Episode 4: How to configure Sitecore SXA …

During the presentations, we talked openly about the good and the not so good things we experienced in our project. We believe this is valuable for the Sitecore community. It is not our goal to talk bad about ourselves and certainly not about Sitecore. The only thing we want to do is share our learnings.

We added some conclusions to our talk.

• It was a good idea to hire a Solr consultant while creating an enterprise situation   Solr is elaborated, full-grown product. However, because it supports so many options it is also complex and it is good to start with the correct configuration from the beginning. The consultant helped us to achieve that.
• Adding Solr to your Azure Cloud environment means you add IAAS components to your PAAS environments. A SAAS solution like Searchtax is a good alternative. During the presentation, we showed that it is possible to create a full-grown Solr Cloud environment in 20 minutes by using the User API of Searchstax. Eventually, Searchstax offers an endpoint to which you can connect to from your Sitecore environment. This means you keep your PAAS environment clean. Also, you save a lot of time by handing over a big part of the responsibility of setting up the Solr environment to Searchstax. Searchstax offers good consultancy to its customers as well. So it is an option to think about. By using a tool like Searchstax you end up with a cleaner environment and above all, you save a lot of time that can be used to do other work.

This blogpost is about learning Solr Cloud for Sitecore

However, whether you decide to setup Solr Cloud in the Azure Cloud environment, or make use of a third party SAAS solution. It is important to have knowledge about Solr Cloud.

You will still need to configure Sitecore to make use of Solr Cloud. The configuration of Sitecore will be different when you use traditional Sitecore or Sitecore SXA. XConnect needs special attention.

In order to understand what you configure you need to know how Solr works. In order to help you with this, I will share the technical knowledge we gathered while setting up Sitecore 9.1 update 2 making use of SXA

Because there will be a lot of information I will create a series of blogs about this subject. The first one is about the process, the second one will give you some technical background. The third and the fourth one are a deeper technical explanation about how we did it and how we solved technical problems

1. To adventure or not to adventure
2. What is Solr Cloud
3. How to setup Solr cloud (To be released 2019-11-11)
4. How to configure Sitecore SXA to make use of Solr Cloud for an enterprise environment ((To be released 2019-11-11) )