With the release of Apache Solr 4.0, we were given a new, powerful mode Solr could work in—SolrCloud. What we got is out-of-the-box distributed indexing and searching at a full scale. We can distribute our collection along multiple machines without having to think about doing it in our application. We can have multiple logical collections defined, running, and managed automatically. In this chapter, we'll see how to manage your SolrCloud instances, how to increase the number of replicas, and have multiple collections inside the same cluster.

This chapter covers both Solr 4.x and Solr 5 when it comes to the creation of SolrCloud clusters and handling collections.