Index Aliases and Zero Downtime

The problem with the reindexing process described previously is that you need to update your application to use the new index name. Index aliases to the rescue!

An index alias is like a shortcut or symbolic link, which can point to one or more indices, and can be used in any API that expects an index name. Aliases give us an enormous amount of flexibility. They allow us to do the following:

We will talk more about the other uses for aliases later in the book. For now we will explain how to use them to switch from an old index to a new index with zero downtime.

There are two endpoints for managing aliases: _alias for single operations, and _aliases to perform multiple operations atomically.

In this scenario, we will assume that your application is talking to an index called my_index. In reality, my_index will be an alias that points to the current real index. We will include a version number in the name of the real index: my_index_v1, my_index_v2, and so forth.

To start off, create the index my_index_v1, and set up the alias my_index to point to it:

PUT /my_index_v1 
PUT /my_index_v1/_alias/my_index 

You can check which index the alias points to:

GET /*/_alias/my_index

Or which aliases point to the index:

GET /my_index_v1/_alias/*

Both of these return the following:

{
    "my_index_v1" : {
        "aliases" : {
            "my_index" : { }
        }
    }
}

Later, we decide that we want to change the mappings for a field in our index. Of course, we can’t change the existing mapping, so we have to reindex our data. To start, we create my_index_v2 with the new mappings:

PUT /my_index_v2
{
    "mappings": {
        "my_type": {
            "properties": {
                "tags": {
                    "type":   "string",
                    "index":  "not_analyzed"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Then we reindex our data from my_index_v1 to my_index_v2, following the process described in Reindexing Your Data. Once we are satisfied that our documents have been reindexed correctly, we switch our alias to point to the new index.

An alias can point to multiple indices, so we need to remove the alias from the old index at the same time as we add it to the new index. The change needs to be atomic, which means that we must use the _aliases endpoint:

POST /_aliases
{
    "actions": [
        { "remove": { "index": "my_index_v1", "alias": "my_index" }},
        { "add":    { "index": "my_index_v2", "alias": "my_index" }}
    ]
}

Your application has switched from using the old index to the new index transparently, with zero downtime.