Building a Solr Cluster with TerraForm – Part 1

So it’s no surprise that I very much have been talking about how amazing TerraForm is, and recently I’ve been doing a lot of investigation into Solr and how to build a scalable Solr Cluster.

So given the kubernetes template I wanted to try my hand at something similar. The goals of this project were the following:

  1. Build a generic template for creating a Solr cloud cluster with distributed shard.
  2. Build out the ability to scale the cluster for now using TerraForm to manually trigger increases to cluster size.
  3. Make the nodes automatically add themselves to the cluster.

And I could do this just using bash scripts and packer. But instead wanted to try my hand at cloud init.

But that’s going to be the end result, I wanted to walkthrough the various steps I go through to get to the end.  The first real step is to get through the installation of Solr on  linux machines to be implemented. 

So let’s start with “What is Solr?”   The answer is that Solr is an open source software solution that provides a means of creating a search engine.  It works in the same vein as ElasticSearch and other technologies.  Solr has been around for quite a while and is used by some of the largest companies that implement search to handle search requests by their customers.  Some of those names are Netflix and CareerBuilder.  See the following links below:

So I’ve decided to try my hand at this and creating my first Solr cluster, and have reviewed the getting started. 

So I ended up looking into it more, and built out the following script to create a “getting started” solr cluster.

sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common
sudo apt-get install -y gnupg-curl
sudo wget | sudo apt-key add

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install unzip
sudo wget

sudo unzip -q solr-8.0.0.zipls
sudo mv solr-8.0.0 /usr/local/bin/solr-8.0.0 -f
sudo rm -f

sudo apt-get install -y default-jdk

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/solr-8.0.0/bin/solr
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/solr-8.0.0/example/cloud/node1/solr
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/solr-8.0.0/example/cloud/node2/solr
sudo /usr/local/bin/solr-8.0.0/bin/bin/solr -e cloud -noprompt

The above will configure a “getting started solr cluster” that leverages all the system defaults and is hardly a production implementation. So my next step will be to change this. But for the sake of getting something running, I took the above script and moved it into a packer template using the following json. The above script is the “../scripts/Solr/”

  "variables": {
    "deployment_code": "",
    "resource_group": "",
    "subscription_id": "",
    "location": "",
    "cloud_environment_name": "Public"
  "builders": [{   
    "type": "azure-arm",
    "cloud_environment_name": "{{user `cloud_environment_name`}}",

    "managed_image_resource_group_name": "{{user `resource_group`}}",
    "managed_image_name": "Ubuntu_16.04_{{isotime \"2006_01_02_15_04\"}}",
    "managed_image_storage_account_type": "Premium_LRS",

    "os_type": "Linux",
    "image_publisher": "Canonical",
    "image_offer": "UbuntuServer",
    "image_sku": "16.04-LTS",

    "vm_size": "Standard_F2s"
  "provisioners": [
      "type": "shell",
      "script": "../scripts/ubuntu/"
      "type": "shell",
      "script": "../scripts/Solr/"
      "inline": [
        "/usr/sbin/waagent -force -deprovision+user &amp;&amp; export HISTSIZE=0 &amp;&amp; sync"
      "inline_shebang": "/bin/sh -e",
      "type": "shell"

The only other script mentioned is the “”, which has the following logic in it, to install the cli and update the ubuntu image:

#! /bin/bash

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

AZ_REPO=$(sudo lsb_release -cs)
sudo echo "deb [arch=amd64] $AZ_REPO main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azure-cli.list
sudo curl -L | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get update &amp;&amp; sudo apt-get install azure-cli

So the above gets me to a good place for being able to create an image with it configured.

For next steps I will be doing the following:

  • Building a more “production friendly” implementation of Solr into the script.
  • Investigating leveraging cloud init instead of the “golden image” experience with Packer.
  • Building out templates around the use of Zookeeper for managing the nodes.

Configuring Terraform Development Environment



Step 1: Install Windows SubSystem on your Windows 10 Machine



Step 2: Install VS Code and Terraform Plugins


You can download VS Code from this link:



Step 3: Opening Terminal



Step 4: Install Unzip on Subsystem


sudo apt-get install unzip

Step 5: Install TerraForm


Go to this link:


Go back to VS Code, and enter the following commands:

wget {url for terraform}
unzip { file name}
sudo mv terraform /usr/local/bin/terraform
rm { file name}
terraform --version

Step 6: Install Packer


Go back to VS Code and execute the following commands:

﻿wget {packer url} 
unzip { file name} 
sudo mv packer /usr/local/bin/packer
﻿rm { file name}

Step 7: Install Azure CLI 2.0


Step 8: Authenticating against Azure




az account get-access-token 

Token lifetimes can be described here –


Building out Azure Container Registry in Terraform

So I’ve previously done posts on the TerraForm template that I built to support creating a kubernetes cluster. The intention behind this was to provide a solution for standing up a kubernetes cluster in Azure Government. To see more information on that cluster I have a blog post here.

Now one of the questions I did get with it, is “How do we integrate this with Azure Container Registry?” And for those not familiar, Azure Container Registry is a PaaS offering that Azure provides that allows you to push your container images to a docker registry and not have to manage the underlying VM, patching, updates, and other maintenance. This allows you to just pay for the space to store the container images, which admittedly are very small.

The first part of implementing this logic was to create the Container Registry in TerraForm by using the following.

A key note is that the use of the “count” variable is to enable that this registry will not be created unless you create a “lkma” which is the VM that operates as the master.

resource "azurerm_container_registry" "container-registry" {
  count = "${lookup(var.instance_counts, "lkma", 0) == 0 ? 0 : 1}"
  name                = "containerRegistry1"
  resource_group_name = "${}"
  location            = "${var.azure_location}"
  admin_enabled       = true
  sku                 = "Standard"

  depends_on = ["azurerm_role_assignment.kub-ad-sp-ra-kv1"]

So honestly didn’t require that much in the way of work. For the next part it is literally just adding a few lines of code to enable the connection between the registry and the kubernetes cluster. Those lines are the following :

echo 'Configure ACR registry for Kubernetes cluster'
kubectl create secret docker-registry <SECRET_NAME> --docker-server $5 --docker-email $6 --docker-username=$7 --docker-password $8
echo 'Script Completed'

So really that is about it. I’ve already made these changes to the GitHub template, so please check it out. The above lines of code allow a user principal information that I pass to the script to be used to connect the azure container registry to my cluster. That’s really about it.

Creating Terraform Scripts from existing resources in Azure Government

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with TerraForm lately, and one of the questions I’ve gotten a lot is the ability to create terraform scripts based on existing resources.

So the use case is the following: You are working on projects, or part of an organization that has a lot of resources in Azure, and you want to start using terraform for a variety of reasons:

  • Being able to iterating in your infrastructure
  • Consistency of environment management
  • Code History of changes

The good new is there is a tool for that. The tool can be found here on github along with a list of pre-requisites.  I’ve used this tool in Azure Commercial and have been really happy with the results. I wanted to use this with Azure Commercial.

NOTE => The Pre-reqs are listed on the az2tf tool, but one they didn’t list I needed to install was jq, using “apt-get install jq”.

Next we need to configure our environment for running terraform.  For me, I ran this using the environment I had configured for Terraform.  In the Git repo, there is a PC Setup document that walks you through how to configure your environment with VS code and Terraform.  I then was able to clone the git repo, and execute the az2tf tool using a Ubuntu subsystem on my Windows 10 machine. 

Now, the tool, az2f, was built to work with azure commercial, and there is one change that has to be made for it to leverage azure government 

Once you have the environment created, and the pre-requisites are all present, you can open a “Terminal” window in vscode, and connect to Azure Government. 

In the ./scripts/ and ./scripts/ files, you will find the following on line 9:

ris=`printf “curl -s  -X GET -H \”Authorization: Bearer %s\” -H \”Content-Type: application/json\”” $bt $sub`

Please change this line to the following:


You can then run the “az2tf” tool by running the following command in the terminal:

./ -s {Subscription ID} -g {Resource Group Name}

This will generate the script, and you will see a new folder created in the structure marked “tf.{Subscription ID}” and inside of it will be all configuration steps to setup the environment.

TerraForm Kubernetes Template

Hello All, I wanted to get a quick blog post out here based on something that I worked on, and finally is seeing the light of day.  I’ve been doing a lot of work with TerraForm, and one of the use cases I found was standing up a Kubernetes cluster.  And specifically I’ve been working with Azure Government, which does not have AKS available.  So how can I build a kubernetes cluster and minimize the lift of creating a cluster and then make it easy to add nodes to the cluster.  So the end result of that goal is here.

Below is a description of the project, and if you’d like to contribute please do, I have some ideas for phase 2 of this that I’m going to build out but I’d love to see what others come up with.


The purpose of this template is to provide an easy-to-use approach to using an Infrastructure-as-a-service deployment to deploy a kubernetes cluster on Microsoft Azure. The goal being that you can start fresh with a standardized approach and preconfigured master and worker nodes.

How it works?

This template create a master node, and as many worker nodes as you specify, and during creation will automatically execute the scripts required to join those nodes to the cluster. The benefit of this being that once your cluster is created, all that is required to add additional nodes is to increase the count of the “lkwn” vm type, and reapply the template. This will cause the newe VMs to be created and the cluster will start orchestrating them automatically.

This template can also be built into a CI/CD pipeline to automatically provision the kubernetes cluster prior to pushing pods to it.

This guide is designed to help you navigate the use of this template to standup and manage the infrastructure required by a kubernetes cluster on azure. You will find the following documentation to assist:

  • Configure Terraform Development Environment: This page provides details on how to setup your locale machine to leverage this template and do development using Terraform, Packer, and VSCode.
  • Use this template: This document walks you through how to leverage this template to build out your kubernetes environment.
  • Understanding the template: This page describs how to understand the Terraform Template being used and walks you through its structure.

Key Contributors!

A special thanks to the following people who contributed to this template:
Brandon Rohrer: who introduced me to this template structure and how it works, as well as assisted with optimizing the functionality provided by this template.