# Promote replica to primary
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/promote-replica-to-primary/106942
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [November 8, 2017, 10:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/promote-replica-to-primary/106942 "2017-11-08T22:36:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@erikstephens](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/erikstephens)
#### Post date: [November 8, 2017, 10:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/promote-replica-to-primary/106942/1 "2017-11-08T22:36:13Z")
After a network partition, primary shards are heavily skewed to the side where the master was. Partition is now healed but there's too much traffic to & from the side with more of the primaries. To resolve that, would like the replicas that were on the other side of the partition to be promoted as primaries. I can stop writes to the index so making sure the replica is in sync is not an issue. The `allocate_stale_primary` command of the reroute api looked close to what I'm trying to do but it complains that primary is already assigned. There are a way to promote replicas to primaries _without_ data movement / triggering reallocation? Thanks!
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### Author:  [@erikstephens](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/erikstephens)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2017, 12:50am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/promote-replica-to-primary/106942/2 "2017-11-09T00:50:49Z")
It's looking like the `cancel` operation is doing what I want: stop writes, flush, cancel causes a replica to become the primary and the old primary to reinitialize as a replica with no data movement. Based on the docs, not sure if that is by design or a happy accident 🙂
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### Author:  [@warkolm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/warkolm)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2017, 2:11am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/promote-replica-to-primary/106942/3 "2017-11-09T02:11:32Z")
I don't think this is by design, but it's good to hear!
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [December 7, 2017, 2:11am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/promote-replica-to-primary/106942/4 "2017-12-07T02:11:54Z")
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