Project Mercury Alpha 6: Now With Solr!

I'm happy to announce the 0.6 Alpha release of the Mercury AMI, now including ApacheSolr as the search backend! This is the last piece of major infrastructure we want to integrate into the stack for scalability purposes. You can now move from a single-server install based on Mercury to a best-practice vertically scaled architecture with separate hardware to run front-end cache, application, back-end cache, search and database!

The quickest way to find it is by searching Amazon EC for "Pantheon" or "Mercury". The manifest path for the latest release (in 32bit and 64 bit flavors) is:

• chapter3-storage/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury-alpha-6.manifest.xml
• chapter3-storage/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury64-alpha-6.2.manifest.xml (back!)

If you'd like to "roll your own" we've updated the wiki instructions page with a new set of instructions for getting Solr up and running as part of the process. Feel free to improve that documentation, as it's definitely a community process.

This will likely be one of the last releases before we move the project into the Beta phase, at which point we'll be focusing on fine tuning and stability as well as portabilty onto non EC2 systems moreso than new features. If you have ideas for additional things you'd like to see integrated in the stack, please chime in. We're also going to be documenting real-world "how to" use-cases — e.g. "how do I put my existing site on Mercury" in user-friendly detail — so stay tuned for that.

As always, let us know what you think of the release, what you'd like to see in future iterations, and how your experience is in using the stack. There's plenty more to come.