Elasticsearch Server - Third Edition

Horizontal expansion

Elasticsearch is a highly scalable search and analytics platform. We can scale it both horizontally and vertically. We discussed how to tune a single node in the Preparing a single Elasticsearch node section earlier in this chapter and we would like to focus on horizontal scaling now; how to handle multiple nodes in the same cluster, what roles should they have, and how to tune the configuration to have a highly reliable, available, and fault tolerant cluster.

You can imagine vertical scaling like building a sky scrapper – we have limited space available and we need to go as high as we can. Of course, that is expensive and requires a lot of engineering done right. On the other hand, we have horizontal scaling, which is like ...