Does having multiple shards of an index on a single node provide any benefits?

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I'm fairly new to ES so this may be a simple question. If I have a "cluster" of one node that has two indices on the node, is there any benefit to having number_of_shards greater than one?

As I understand it this will split the index across two shards, but won't provide any resiliency in the way a replica will. Is that correct?

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Welcome!

Correct.

The number of replicas is controlled by the number_of_replicas setting. Defaults to 1 which means one copy of each primary.
But if you have only one node, replicas won't be allocated.

There is. Like if you are indexing a lot of data per second, writing in 2 parallel "index" (here shards) could help for example. Or if you have more than 20-50 gb of index size, keeping the size per shard around 20-50 gb will make sense.
But with a "basic", "small" use case, one shard id perfectly fine.

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Thank you! Very helpful.

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