Elastic

Explain Replicas

Difficulty: unrated

Source: bregman-arie/devops-exercises by Arie Bregman

Answer

In a network/cloud environment where failures can be expected any time, it is very useful and highly recommended to have a failover mechanism in case a shard/node somehow goes offline or disappears for whatever reason. To this end, Elasticsearch allows you to make one or more copies of your index’s shards into what are called replica shards, or replicas for short.