Solr is a big improvement over Lucene for sitecore. It is easy to set up on
physical and virtual machine. However, since the Azure platform is open for
many options, there are quite few ways of accomplishing this task.
We can create a virtual machine on Azure. Install Solr in it and change the configuration to point to that location. Of course, it is easier said than done. You will face few configuration choices that you need to select.
Among the tips and tricks are enabling port 80 for http Traffic and enabling port 8983 for Solr port.
Another option is Solr Apache Bitnami. The stack provides a one-click install solution for Apache Solr.
Download installers and virtual machines, or run your own Apache Solr server in the cloud.
Apache Solr is a fast search platform from the open source Apache Lucene project.
Where Lucene is a powerful search engine framework, Solr includes an http-wrapper around Lucene so
it’s ready-to-use out of the box. Features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search,
dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document handling, and geospatial search.
Solr is used by some of the largest companies in the world to power their public projects.
I can emphasis enough on how great this feature is. Deployment slots are incredible! They are the reason for many people to start using Azure App Services.
You don’t need to worry if at deployment, there is a chance that the site won’t come up.
Instead, you build, test and then if you content with the result, you swipe the slot. WOW!!
In this process, we went through a team deployment process.
Of course, there is a shortcut, but it will come with a price of not having a backup of changes.
If you want to push directly to the Slot, you can do it directly through Visual Studio or even through Azure.
This is a feature that need to be improved in sitecore. In any Sitecore Install, the connectionstring is hidden in App_Config folder from the web config.
With Azure as the tool used to manage and deploy the application, the connectionstring settings should be in WebConfig. Having theses keys in the web config,
facilitate the management of these keys for each environment.
I really recommend that you move your settings to web config and ultimately to Azure to facilitate your life.
