December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
434 pages
10h 29m
English
Let us first understand what a shard is. One index contains documents of one or more types. Shards help in distributing an index over the cluster. Shards help in dividing the documents of a single index over multiple nodes. There is a limit to the amount of data that can be stored on a single node, and that limit is dictated by the storage, memory, and processing capacities of that node. Shards help by splitting the data of a single index over the cluster and hence allowing the storage, memory, and processing capacities of the cluster to be utilized.
The process of dividing the data among shards is called sharding. Sharding is inherent in Elasticsearch and is a way to scale and parallelize, as follows:
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