14 Administration

So far, we’ve seen the inner workings of Elasticsearch, including its excellent queries and other features. We haven’t bothered with advanced configurations like how nodes communicate with each other, how big shards need to be, and what settings to change to modify the Kibana port. In this chapter, we discuss these administrative features. We address some of them by using the queries we created while running the search server.

One powerful feature of Elasticsearch is its ability to scale up the server to provide petabytes of data. There is no complexity in setting this up other than procuring additional nodes. We cover how to scale the cluster in the first part of this chapter. We also experiment with the sizing of shards and see why allocating more replicas alleviates read performance problems.

We then move on to discuss how nodes communicate internally and form a cluster. We look at network settings and their importance in the second section of the chapter.

14.1 Scaling the cluster

14.1.1 Adding nodes to the cluster

14.1.2 Cluster health

14.1.3 Increasing read throughput

14.2 Node communication

14.3 Shard sizing

14.3.1 Setting up a single index

14.3.2 Setting up multiple indexes

14.4 Snapshots