Relation between shards and nodes

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
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Could anyone please tell me a little about the relation between shards and nodes.

If I have 30 nodes, I believe it won't work setting up more than 30 shards per index.

In the other hand, if I have 30 nodes, setting up only 5 shards would be a huge waste of nodes.

Am I right ?

Thanks in advance,

Jessé

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How many indices will you have? And how many replicas do you plan to use per shard?

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Shards represents a subpart of an index. It's a group of documents that goes to a shard.
A shard lives anywhere in the cluster and is allocated on a node.

An index is a group of shards. As a developer you index a document to an index but the document is routed to a shard where it gets stored and indexed.

You have primary shards and you may have replica shards. Replicas are perfect copies of primary shards.

A node is a JVM instance running elasticsearch.
It can host multiple shards, coming from multiple indices.

Does this answer?

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Thank for replying @A_B and @dadoonet. I don't have any indices yet. I am just studying. At my studing I figured out that the amount of shards I will set must not be higher than the total of nodes I have, otherwise I would be wasting resources. Is that correct?

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It will depend on the use case. For some use cases, e.g. search use cases and high query throughput and a small data set, a single shard per node may be optimal, but most use cases have more than that. This talk may give you a better idea about how to determine the ideal number of shards for your use case.

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