Indexes, Documents, Shards: Vocabulary in Practice

7 min
Audience
beginner with the lab running (Module 1)
Duration
25 to 30 min
Module
2/7
Target skill
read the state of an Elasticsearch cluster and correctly name what you see: node, index, shard, replica, document

In One Picture

Imagine a municipal library. The cluster is the city's network of libraries; each building is a node. An index is a thematic section ("courses", "reviews", "access logs"); a document is a book in that section, with its JSON record. When a section grows too big for a single building, it is split into shards: the "courses" section from A to M in building 1, from N to Z in building 2. And to lose nothing in case of fire, a photocopy of each piece is kept in another building: that is the replica. In the lab, you have only one building. You will see right away what that changes.

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This lesson is part of the “Elasticsearch: Index and Find Documents” module

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