[SOLR-9038] Support snapshot management functionality for a solr collection

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 6.2
• Component/s: SolrCloud
• Assignee: David Smiley
• Reporter: Hrishikesh Gadre
• Created: 25/Apr/16 19:36
• Updated: 21/Nov/19 00:42
• Resolved: 28/Jun/18 15:00

Description

Currently work is under-way to implement backup/restore API for Solr cloud (SOLR-5750). SOLR-5750 is about providing an ability to "copy" index files and collection metadata to a configurable location.

In addition to this, we should also provide a facility to create "named" snapshots for Solr collection. Here by "snapshot" I mean configuring the underlying Lucene IndexDeletionPolicy to not delete a specific commit point (e.g. using PersistentSnapshotIndexDeletionPolicy). This should not be confused with SOLR-5340 which implements core level "backup" functionality.

The primary motivation of this feature is to decouple recording/preserving a known consistent state of a collection from actually "copying" the relevant files to a physically separate location. This decoupling have number of advantages

• We can use specialized data-copying tools for transferring Solr index files. e.g. in Hadoop environment, typically distcp tool is used to copy files from one location to other. This tool provides various options to configure degree of parallelism, bandwidth usage as well as integration with different types and versions of file systems (e.g. AWS S3, Azure Blob store etc.)
• This separation of concern would also help Solr to focus on the key functionality (i.e. querying and indexing) while delegating the copy operation to the tools built for that purpose.
• Users can decide if/when to copy the data files as against creating a snapshot. e.g. a user may want to create a snapshot of a collection before making an experimental change (e.g. updating/deleting docs, schema change etc.). If the experiment is successful, he can delete the snapshot (without having to copy the files). If the experiment is failed, then he can copy the files associated with the snapshot and restore.

Note that Apache Blur project is also providing a similar feature BLUR-132

Issue Links

• is related to: SOLR-5750 Backup/Restore API for SolrCloud

Sub-Tasks

• Ability to create/delete/list snapshots for a solr core: Closed
• Ability to create/delete/list snapshots for a solr collection: Closed
• Add a command-line tool to manage the snapshots functionality: Resolved
• Collection deletion leaves behind the snapshot metadata: Resolved