Cluster-level shard allocation and routing settings

You can use the following settings to control shard allocation and recovery:

A cluster is balanced when it has an equal number of shards on each node without having a concentration of shards from any index on any node. Elasticsearch runs an automatic process called rebalancing which moves shards between the nodes in your cluster to improve its balance. Rebalancing obeys all other shard allocation rules such as allocation filtering and forced awareness which may prevent it from completely balancing the cluster. In that case, rebalancing strives to acheve the most balanced cluster possible within the rules you have configured. If you are using data tiers then Elasticsearch automatically applies allocation filtering rules to place each shard within the appropriate tier. These rules mean that the balancer works independently within each tier.

You can use the following settings to control the rebalancing of shards across the cluster:

Rebalancing works by computing a weight for each node based on its allocation of shards, and then moving shards between nodes to reduce the weight of the heavier nodes and increase the weight of the lighter ones. The cluster is balanced when there is no possible shard movement that can bring the weight of any node closer to the weight of any other node by more than a configurable threshold. The following settings allow you to control the details of these calculations.

The disk-based shard allocator ensures that all nodes have enough disk space without performing more shard movements than necessary. It allocates shards based on a pair of thresholds known as the low watermark and the high watermark. Its primary goal is to ensure that no node exceeds the high watermark, or at least that any such overage is only temporary. If a node exceeds the high watermark then Elasticsearch will solve this by moving some of its shards onto other nodes in the cluster.

The allocator also tries to keep nodes clear of the high watermark by forbidding the allocation of more shards to a node that exceeds the low watermark. Importantly, if all of your nodes have exceeded the low watermark then no new shards can be allocated and Elasticsearch will not be able to move any shards between nodes in order to keep the disk usage below the high watermark. You must ensure that your cluster has enough disk space in total and that there are always some nodes below the low watermark.

Shard movements triggered by the disk-based shard allocator must also satisfy all other shard allocation rules such as allocation filtering and forced awareness. If these rules are too strict then they can also prevent the shard movements needed to keep the nodes' disk usage under control. If you are using data tiers then Elasticsearch automatically configures allocation filtering rules to place shards within the appropriate tier, which means that the disk-based shard allocator works independently within each tier.

If a node is filling up its disk faster than Elasticsearch can move shards elsewhere then there is a risk that the disk will completely fill up. To prevent this, as a last resort, once the disk usage reaches the flood-stage watermark Elasticsearch will block writes to indices with a shard on the affected node. It will also continue to move shards onto the other nodes in the cluster. When disk usage on the affected node drops below the high watermark, Elasticsearch automatically removes the write block.

You can use the following settings to control disk-based allocation:

An example of updating the low watermark to at least 100 gigabytes free, a high watermark of at least 50 gigabytes free, and a flood stage watermark of 10 gigabytes free, and updating the information about the cluster every minute:

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "transient": {
    "cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.low": "100gb",
    "cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.high": "50gb",
    "cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.flood_stage": "10gb",
    "cluster.info.update.interval": "1m"
  }
}

You can use custom node attributes as awareness attributes to enable Elasticsearch to take your physical hardware configuration into account when allocating shards. If Elasticsearch knows which nodes are on the same physical server, in the same rack, or in the same zone, it can distribute the primary shard and its replica shards to minimise the risk of losing all shard copies in the event of a failure.

When shard allocation awareness is enabled with the dynamic cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.attributes setting, shards are only allocated to nodes that have values set for the specified awareness attributes. If you use multiple awareness attributes, Elasticsearch considers each attribute separately when allocating shards.

By default Elasticsearch uses adaptive replica selection to route search or GET requests. However, with the presence of allocation awareness attributes Elasticsearch will prefer using shards in the same location (with the same awareness attribute values) to process these requests. This behavior can be disabled by specifying export ES_JAVA_OPTS="$ES_JAVA_OPTS -Des.search.ignore_awareness_attributes=true" system property on every node that is part of the cluster.

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

You can use cluster-level shard allocation filters to control where Elasticsearch allocates shards from any index. These cluster wide filters are applied in conjunction with per-index allocation filtering and allocation awareness.

Shard allocation filters can be based on custom node attributes or the built-in _name, _host_ip, _publish_ip, _ip, _host, _id and _tier attributes.

The cluster.routing.allocation settings are dynamic, enabling live indices to be moved from one set of nodes to another. Shards are only relocated if it is possible to do so without breaking another routing constraint, such as never allocating a primary and replica shard on the same node.

The most common use case for cluster-level shard allocation filtering is when you want to decommission a node. To move shards off of a node prior to shutting it down, you could create a filter that excludes the node by its IP address:

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "transient" : {
    "cluster.routing.allocation.exclude._ip" : "10.0.0.1"
  }
}

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