SolrCloud provides a new way to enable distributed enterprise search using a Apache Solr in enterprises. Previously, with the standard distributed Solr support, lot of the manual work had been automated by SolrCloud. With the introduction of SolrCloud, the manual steps like configuring solr-config.xml to talk with shards, adding documents to the shards, and so on, work became automatic. Unlike the traditional approach of master-slave based distributed Solr, SolrCloud provides a leader-replica-based approach as its implementation. SolrCloud runs on top of Apache ZooKeeper. First, let's understand the ZooKeeper.
SolrCloud contains a cluster of nodes, which use Apache ZooKeeper to talk with each other. Apache ZooKeeper is responsible for maintaining co-ordination among various nodes. Besides co-ordinating among nodes, it also maintains configuration information, and group services to the distributed system. Due to its in-memory management of information;...