Change your deployment configuration

There are several reasons why you might want to change the configuration of a deployment:

For single availability zone deployments, there is downtime to portions of your cluster when changes are applied. For HA deployments and with the exception of major version upgrades, we can perform all these changes without interrupting your deployment. During the application of these changes, you can continue to search and index.

Many changes can also be done in bulk: in one action, you can add more memory and storage, upgrade minor versions, adjust the number of plugins and adjust fault tolerance by changing the number of availability zones. Elastic Cloud Enterprise performs all of these changes with a grow-and-shrink operation, making an Elasticsearch cluster and other instances with the new configuration join the existing deployment. After re-joining, updated nodes recover their indexes and start handling requests. When all updated new nodes are ready, the old nodes that were replaced are removed. If you do a major version upgrade, you cannot change the cluster configuration at the same time. Perform these configuration changes separately.