Chapter 9. Scaling out
This chapter covers
- Adding nodes to your Elasticsearch cluster
- Master election in your Elasticsearch cluster
- Removing and decommissioning nodes
- Using the _cat API to understand your cluster
- Planning and scaling strategies
- Aliases and custom routing
Now that you have a good understanding of what Elasticsearch is capable of, you’re ready to hear about Elasticsearch’s next killer feature: the ability to scale—that is, to be able to handle more indexing and searching or to handle indexing and searching faster. These days, scaling is an important factor when dealing with millions or billions of documents. You won’t always be able to support the amount of traffic you’d like to on a single running instance of Elasticsearch, or node, without scaling in some form. Fortunately, Elasticsearch is easy to scale. In this chapter we’ll take a look at the scaling capabilities that Elasticsearch has at its disposal and how you can use those features to give Elasticsearch more performance and, at the same time, more reliability.