Technology upgrade is a key pillar of software infrastructure. However, upgrading search and information retrieval systems is a complex task. At Bloomberg, we extended the open source Apache Solr implementation with in-house patches to customize it for our use cases. This made upgrading to a newer version quite challenging, and when you have close to a billion documents that are used by major financial institutions across the world you cannot afford any mistakes.
Learn how the News Search Infrastructure Team at Bloomberg migrated from a highly customized implementation of Apache Solr to the upstream Apache Solr while making sure that quality, correctness and performance of the system is not affected. You will learn about different strategies we used before, during and after the migration to make the upgrade transparent to the users, all while serving millions of requests everyday.