Microsoft Open Technologies releases Windows Azure support for Solr 4.0 by Brian Benz.
From the post:
Microsoft Open Technologies is pleased to share the latest update to the Windows Azure self-deployment option for Apache Solr 4.0.
Solr 4.0 is the first release to use the shared 4.x branch for Lucene & Solr and includes support for SolrCloud functionality. SolrCloud allows you to scale a single index via replication over multiple Solr instances running multiple SolrCores for massive scaling and redundancy.
To learn more about Solr 4.0, have a look at this 40 minute video covering Solr 4 Highlights, by Mark Miller of LucidWorks from Apache Lucene Eurocon 2011.
To download and install Solr on Windows Azure visit our GitHub page to learn more and download the SDK.
Another alternative for implementing the best of Lucene/Solr on Windows Azure is provided by our partner LucidWorks. LucidWorks Search on Windows Azure delivers a high-performance search solution that enables quick and easy provisioning of Lucene/Solr search functionality without any need to install, manage or operate Lucene/Solr servers, and it supports pre-built connectors for various types of enterprise data, structured data, unstructured data and web sites.
Beyond the positive impact for Solr and Azure in general, this means your Solr skills will be useful in new places.