Introducing backup and restore mechanisms

In Elasticsearch, you can implement a backup and restore functionality in two different ways depending on the requirements and efforts put in. You can either create a script to create manual backups and restoration or you can opt for a more automated and functionality-rich Backup-Restore API offered by Elasticsearch.

Backup using snapshot API

A snapshot is the backup of a complete cluster or selected indices. The best thing about snapshots is that they are incremental in nature. So, only data that has been changed since the last snapshot will be taken in the next snapshot.

Life was not so easy before the release of Elasticsearch Version 1.0.0. This release not only introduced powerful aggregation functionalities to Elasticsearch, but also brought in the Snapshot Restore API to create backups and restore them on the fly. Initially, only a shared file system was supported by this API, but gradually it has been possible to use this API on AWS to create...