SOLR is great but it's a pain to manage it in the cloud. If you lose an EC2 instance, there is manual work involved when you bring up a new instance. You have t

SOLR is great but it's a pain to manage it in the cloud. If you lose an EC2 instance, there is manual work involved when you bring up a new instance. You have to tell the new instance servers which shards they're going to replicate. If the EC2 instance hosting shard1 replica2 goes down, you can't just bring up a new instance and have it be replica2. You need to use the API(which is just a call to a bunch of URLs) to get the new instance to be part of shard1. Also, a good cloud overview UI would be nice. 8.1.1 does have some improvements. Also, SOLR speed is almost directly proportional to disk speed. If you index is on solid state drives with high iops, you'll be fine. Backing up a large index is a little painful too.