Solr Distributed Search vs. Solr Cloud

Question

For Solr 4.3 users, what would be the benefit of using Solr Distributed Search over Solr Cloud?

Or should all Solr deployment after 4.x just use Solr Cloud, and forget about Solr Distributed Search?

Answer 1

• Benefit:

There won't be any benefit of Distributed search over solr Cloud. Solr Cloud is currently the most efficient way to deploy solr cluster. It takes care of all your instances using zookeeper and is very efficient for high availability.

• Efficient management

Zookeeper decides which of your documents go to which instance. I have used Solr Cloud in production also and it work wonderfully for high traffic scenarios.

Answer 2

Solr cloud it self resembles distributed search via solr. No you can still use all deployments after 4.x as normal standalone solr instance.Just avoid zkHost parameter in bootstrap for that.

Answer 3

JOINs are not supported in SOLR cloud which is a big drawback.

If you want to control shards yourself, means which shard will contain which record, go for distributed search otherwise go for cloud search. Cloud manage all shards itself.

We can have multiple instances of SOLR so in case if one fails, we can move to other in distributed search. In cloud search, ZK manage all these things so if ZK fail, system will be down.