Managing the snapshot lifecycle

Snapshots are a crucial aspect of operating your stack in a production environment. It allows you to have frequent backups of your whole cluster and be able to use backups to restore your system and data in the case of a serious failure. Elasticsearch comes with a built-in mechanism to streamline the creation and retention of snapshots: Snapshot Lifecycle Management (SLM). It is a very important feature that removes the burden of worrying about taking regular snapshots.

In this recipe, we go through the process of setting up an SLM policy and applying it to our deployment.

Getting ready

Make sure to have completed the Monitoring Kubernetes environments with Elastic Agent recipe in Chapter 10.

For this recipe, we’ll be creating a repository for the snapshot. Follow the Setting up a snapshot repository to register a new repository on AWS recipe in Chapter 1. If you happen to have set up the repository on any other cloud provider, that...