I've used offline indexing with Solr back in 2010-2012, and this was because the latency between the Solr server and the MySQL db (indexing done via dataimport

I've used offline indexing with Solr back in 2010-2012, and this was because the latency between the Solr server and the MySQL db (indexing done via dataimport handler) was causing the indexer to take hours instead of the sub 1 hour (same server vs servers in same datacenter). In many ways Solr has come a long way since, and I'm curious to see how well they can make a similar system perform in the cloud environment.