From Apache to Solr to Elasticsearch: The Evolution of Zendesk's Search Experience

Stefan Will

Sameera Mahajani

Zendesk manages terabytes of customer data in the form of support ticket comments, user data, knowledge base content, etc. In Zendesk's previous search architecture based on Apache Solr 3.6 (pre-cloud), manual sharding, operational overhead, difficulty of schema updates, and lack of near-real time indexing was limiting scalability, performance and development velocity. This talk will provide insights into the reasons Zendesk migrated from Apache Solr to Elasticsearch, the journey, and the lessons learned while building their new search and indexing architecture.