Solr and the cloud

Abstract: This thesis is produced within the M. Sc. in Computer and Information Engineering program at Uppsala University in collaboration with Itera Consulting AB. Itera Consulting is a IT company based in Stockholm, that among other things work with implementations of Apache Solr. Apache Solr is very scalable, and it is the engine for search and navigation functionalities on many of the large websites around the world, such as apple.com and DN.se. The scope of this thesis was to give a general overview of what the cloud is and the services it offers, analyse security aspects that are specific for the cloud, and analyse how Solr's indexing time performance is affected by scaling of infrastructure and sharding. To define the cloud as a service, and specific security aspects for the cloud, a literature study was compiled into a summarising definition of the cloud, as well as a compilation of the analysis of security issues specific for the cloud. To analyse how Solr's indexing time performance is affected by scaling the infrastructure and sharding, a prototype  was done with  Solr on Windows Azure, which is Microsoft's cloud platform. Tests have since designed and implemented in Windows Azure VMs, which has been set up in varying size and number.