At Acquia we have the Acquia Search service. This service allows people to connect with Apache Solr (A search application) and also provides high availability and high scalability.

This session will contain :
- Basic understanding of Solr and examples of use cases where the most obvious solution is not always the best solution. We'll try to teach you to look further and make smarter decisions.
- How we use Ruby scripts and Nagios to monitor critical components such as query time, memory, etc...
- What is an optimal server for Solr, and how to build it using Puppet
- Request handling with Nginx to help our load balancing process
- How this scales for up to +3000 Solr cores, using a Master and Slave, even a repeater.
- The role of Solr 3 vs Solr 4, and some small discussion perhaps about elastic search
- How we fulfills our needs in terms of spawning new solr cores for customers automatically.
- How we created authentication for Apache Solr while keeping its speed and keeping it simple to use.

This process took time to build so I hope this session can bring developers up to speed with the modern techniques and hopefully it can create some itches here and there so people start exploring. Setting up your own Solr Server is quite easy, but you don't want to wake up and figure out the server needs more capacity, or even worse, it is down. You certainly don't want to repeat the whole process to build an exact copy of an existing system for another client.

If you are interested in the internals of Solr and how to manage this then this session has been build for you.
If you are interested in Solr from a developer point of view, you are certainly also welcome.
We'll give hints and tips to speed up Solr and to make better use of its cache system.

We will not go in depth module wise, a BOF will be appropriate for the more in-depth Solr/Search questions, developments and conversations.