SearchStax Help Center

SearchStax Managed Search service clients sometimes ask us about a Blue-Green Deployment architecture. The Blue deployment is the prod server that responds to queries. The Green deployment has identical content for testing config changes and other upgrades.

When tests are complete, a DNS adjustment routes query traffic to the updated Green server. Blue (now called Stale) serves as an emergency fall-back option, or becomes the new update platform, or is simply deleted to reduce expense.

Several out-of-the-box (and also premium) Managed Search features can be combined to satisfy the typical Blue-Green objectives for your project:

• If you want to create a separate but identical deployment for updates and testing, see the procedure in Can I upgrade up to a larger Solr deployment? This involves restoring a backup of Blue to the new Green deployment. The new deployment can be any size, but must use the same cloud provider and Solr version.
• If you need to test using a different Solr version, see Can I make a “major” Solr upgrade? This procedure describes how to migrate your data to a Green deployment with a different version of Solr (where you can’t simply restore a backup).
• To do an instantaneous swap of Green and Blue, see Does SearchStax support Vanity DNS? We can set up a DNS alias and redirect it to either deployment at will. Platinum and Platinum Plus clients can trigger the swap from our DNS Alias API.
• The Stale server (the former Blue) can be retained to provide an emergency fallback system in case the new Green prod develops a difficulty. You can delete it later to save expense until the next upgrade.
• If you picture using the Stale deployment as a permanent emergency fallback, you should investigate our Hot Disaster Recovery feature instead. This feature automatically makes backups of the prod system and restores them to the recovery system, usually on a daily basis. If prod becomes unresponsive for five minutes, the DNS alias automatically switches to the secondary system. (There is a brief time each day when the secondary system is unavailable while restoring the backup.)
• Premium clients who need near real-time disaster recovery are advised to consider Cross Data Center Replication (CDCR). This feature is available to premium Managed Search clients in Solr versions 7.2.1 to 8.x.x on a case-by-case basis depending on the size on the deployment. It is not available in Solr 9+. (See the note at the end of this list.)
  • For a technical perspective on Solr CDCR in SearchStax, see Cross Data Center Replication in Apache Solr 7 on AWS.
• For Blue-Green implementation combined with a Sitecore deployment, see our blog post on Sitecore Blue-Green Implementation on Solr and SearchStax.