Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 45. Production Deployment

If you have made it this far in the book, hopefully you’ve learned a thing or two about Elasticsearch and are ready to deploy your cluster to production. This chapter is not meant to be an exhaustive guide to running your cluster in production, but it covers the key things to consider before putting your cluster live.

Three main areas are covered:

• Logistical considerations, such as hardware recommendations and deployment strategies

• Configuration changes that are more suited to a production environment

• Post-deployment considerations, such as security, maximizing indexing performance, and backups

Hardware

If you’ve been following the normal development path, you’ve probably been playing with Elasticsearch on your laptop or on a small cluster of machines laying around. But when it comes time to deploy Elasticsearch to production, there are a few recommendations that you should consider. Nothing is a hard-and-fast rule; Elasticsearch is used for a wide range of tasks and on a bewildering array of machines. But these recommendations provide good starting points based on our experience with production clusters.

Memory

If there is one resource that you will run out of first, it will likely be memory. Sorting and aggregations can both be memory hungry, so enough heap space to accommodate these is important. Even when the heap is comparatively small, extra memory can be given to the OS filesystem cache. Because many data structures used by Lucene ...