Acquia Search is a hosted Apache Solr service that Acquia has provided with each subscription since 2009.

Last year, the service was re-launched behind the scenes on a new infrastructure to provide even more automation and integration with our other systems. Taking concepts in part from Drupal Gardens, we built a Drupal site that serves as a deployment machine: it receives data via Services module to create or update nodes. The data on the nodes is then used to configure load balancer and Apache Solr servers using a combination of git and direct ssh tasks using phpseclib.

This talk will include

• A summary of the existing challenges to operations and development of new features
• A high-level picture of how this is orchestrated by Drupal
• How server configuration is managed for Apache Solr
• Request handling with Nginx to help our load balancing process
• How this scales for up to 4000+ Solr cores.
• How we spawn new search cores for customers automatically.
• Some more detailed explanations of how Drupal modules, the Drupal queue, and PHP libraries are leveraged.

A PDF version of the slides is available.

We hope you will come out of this talk with a new view of Drupal as a potential automation tool, and think about building your own system or adopting existing projects like Aegir or DevShop to help manage your deployment.