How does elastic search move shards from hot to warm/warm to hot nodes?

Yes, pretty much. The "target" copy is more like a replica than a primary for most of the relocation process, and like all other replicas it receives all indexing operations. However, this question is a bit strange because you wouldn't normally be indexing into an index that's being moved to a warm node.

I see. Yes, a new replica is always built by copying information from the current primary wherever that might be.

1 Like