"Enough" is a very subjective concept...What are your expectations ? 30 mi docs/day are also subjective (in general a breeze for ES to handle), what is in your document ? (to the extreme, it can contain just an id or a full book or logdump, etc). Are you trying to optimize search speed (do you have an SLA) ? Are you worried about scaling up ? Are you keeping the docs forever, using it for storage ? I think if you have better answers for this you can get better responses...if you have daily data, you can use a daily index (foo_20150730, foo_20150801) and an alias to add flexibility to your setup. Number of shards, hosts is always subjective to your use case. Number of replicas attached to your failure tolerance.