Elasticsearch indexing

We have our Elasticsearch cluster up and running, and we also know how to use the Elasticsearch REST API to index our data, delete it, and retrieve it. We also know how to use search to get our documents. If you are used to SQL databases, you might know that before you can start putting the data there, you need to create a structure, which will describe what your data looks like. Although Elasticsearch is a schema-less search engine and can figure out the data structure on the fly, we think that controlling the structure and thus defining it ourselves is a better way. In the following few pages, you'll see how to create new indices (and how to delete them). Before we look closer at the available API methods, let's see what the indexing process looks like.

Shards and replicas

As you recollect from the previous chapter, the Elasticsearch index is built of one or more shards and each of them contains part of your document set. Each of these shards can also have replicas...