As you might be aware, a new feature named SolrCloud was introduced in Apache Solr 4.0, and it enables us to perform searching and distributed indexing at a full scale. Prior to SolrCloud, the sharding concept was heavily used as far as managing a Solr distributed cluster was concerned. However, managing it was a challenge, which allowed the SolrCloud concept to come into play and made the activity even easier and more robust. Let us go through the challenges faced using sharding, the cons of which made SolrCloud exhale. They are as follows:
Maintenance of the index view: Sharding restricts updations and deletions to be forwarded to the appropriate shard, to ensure there is only one version of each document.
Auto-failure recovery: If a shard goes down, that portion of the index goes offline and you need to bring it up and run it manually with a backup.
Cluster configuration: Using sharding in a distributed environment and managing
schema.xmlandsolrconfig.xmlcan be quite...