Cluster-level shard allocation and routing settings

To enable shard allocation awareness:

With this example configuration, if you start two nodes with node.attr.rack_id set to rack_one and create an index with 5 primary shards and 1 replica of each primary, all primaries and replicas are allocated across the two nodes.

If you add two nodes with node.attr.rack_id set to rack_two, Elasticsearch moves shards to the new nodes, ensuring (if possible) that no two copies of the same shard are in the same rack.

If rack_two fails and takes down both its nodes, by default Elasticsearch allocates the lost shard copies to nodes in rack_one. To prevent multiple copies of a particular shard from being allocated in the same location, you can enable forced awareness.

By default, if one location fails, Elasticsearch assigns all of the missing replica shards to the remaining locations. While you might have sufficient resources across all locations to host your primary and replica shards, a single location might be unable to host ALL of the shards.

To prevent a single location from being overloaded in the event of a failure, you can set cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.force so no replicas are allocated until nodes are available in another location.

For example, if you have an awareness attribute called zone and configure nodes in zone1 and zone2, you can use forced awareness to prevent Elasticsearch from allocating replicas if only one zone is available:

cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.attributes: zone
cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.force.zone.values: zone1,zone2 

With this example configuration, if you start two nodes with node.attr.zone set to zone1 and create an index with 5 shards and 1 replica, Elasticsearch creates the index and allocates the 5 primary shards but no replicas. Replicas are only allocated once nodes with node.attr.zone set to zone2 are available.

The cluster allocation settings support the following built-in attributes:

You can use wildcards when specifying attribute values, for example:

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "transient": {
    "cluster.routing.allocation.exclude._ip": "192.168.2.*"
  }
}

An entire cluster may be set to read-only with the following dynamic setting:

There is a soft limit on the number of shards in a cluster, based on the number of nodes in the cluster. This is intended to prevent operations which may unintentionally destabilize the cluster.

If an operation, such as creating a new index, restoring a snapshot of an index, or opening a closed index would lead to the number of shards in the cluster going over this limit, the operation will fail with an error indicating the shard limit.

If the cluster is already over the limit, due to changes in node membership or setting changes, all operations that create or open indices will fail until either the limit is increased as described below, or some indices are closed or deleted to bring the number of shards below the limit.

Replicas count towards this limit, but closed indexes do not. An index with 5 primary shards and 2 replicas will be counted as 15 shards. Any closed index is counted as 0, no matter how many shards and replicas it contains.

The limit defaults to 1,000 shards per data node, and can be dynamically adjusted using the following property:

For example, a 3-node cluster with the default setting would allow 3,000 shards total, across all open indexes. If the above setting is changed to 500, then the cluster would allow 1,500 shards total.

User-defined metadata can be stored and retrieved using the Cluster Settings API. This can be used to store arbitrary, infrequently-changing data about the cluster without the need to create an index to store it. This data may be stored using any key prefixed with cluster.metadata.. For example, to store the email address of the administrator of a cluster under the key cluster.metadata.administrator, issue this request:

PUT /_cluster/settings
{
  "persistent": {
    "cluster.metadata.administrator": "sysadmin@example.com"
  }
}

The cluster state maintains index tombstones to explicitly denote indices that have been deleted. The number of tombstones maintained in the cluster state is controlled by the following property, which cannot be updated dynamically:

The settings which control logging can be updated dynamically with the logger. prefix. For instance, to increase the logging level of the indices.recovery module to DEBUG, issue this request:

PUT /_cluster/settings
{
  "transient": {
    "logger.org.elasticsearch.indices.recovery": "DEBUG"
  }
}

Plugins can create a kind of tasks called persistent tasks. Those tasks are usually long-lived tasks and are stored in the cluster state, allowing the tasks to be revived after a full cluster restart.

Every time a persistent task is created, the master node takes care of assigning the task to a node of the cluster, and the assigned node will then pick up the task and execute it locally. The process of assigning persistent tasks to nodes is controlled by the following properties, which can be updated dynamically: