Running Solr on Google Cloud

    Google App Engine has gone under a great number of changes and originally I set out to use it to my advantage but instead went through Google's cloud platform to run solr on a virtual machine. This gave me a lot more flexibility and didn't require to change any of Solr's source code. In theory changing the source code to handle the file system available through app engine would work.
      I'm not going to get into the steps of how I did this, I think it's pretty straight forward, setup your linux vm and install java, then set up tomcat with Solr. With my catalog-demo, I used the site to proxy to the vm and gave the vm permission to only my web site's IP. The links below are docs that give more information on that. As far as costs go, it is very cheap to spin up a machine and to get the Solr server running. However I'm not happy with the solution and know I can create an even better solution so I've shutdown the server and started looking at other approaches available. I wish Google provided a one click deployment for Solr, so that I didn't have to create the vm but currently it isn't supported and I don't see it being available in the future.

Other Approaches
     Elastic Search one click deployment is another approach that I'm looking at with my catalog-demo, I still want to provide an example with solr + solrnet in the source repository but I'm not going to use it for my production example. Even if the costs are low I want them to be as closely to zero as possible since this project is only for learning purposes.

Resources
Instances and Networks - Google Compute Engine — Google Cloud Platform
Networking and Firewalls - Google Compute Engine — Google Cloud Platform

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