11.5. Summary

We’ve covered a lot of information in this chapter, with the main focus being administration and optimization of your Elasticsearch cluster. Now that you have a firm understanding of these concepts, let’s recap:

Index templates enable autocreation of indices that share common settings.

Default mappings are convenient for the repetitive tasks of creating similar mappings across indices. Aliases allow you to query across many indices with a single name, thereby allowing you to keep your data segmented if needed.

The cluster health API provides a simple way to gauge the general health of your cluster, nodes, and shards.

Use the slow index and slow query logs to help diagnose index and query operations that can be affecting the performance of the cluster.

Armed with a solid understanding of how the JVM, Lucene, and Elasticsearch allocate and use memory, you can prevent the operating system from swapping processes to disk.

The snapshot API provides a convenient way to back up and restore your cluster with networkattached storage. Repository plugins expand this functionality to public cloud vendors.