Remove nodes from ELK cluster

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

I have Elasticsearch 6.3 OSS 3-node cluster. One master and 2 data nodes. I added another data node to the cluster. Then, removed it using the following API call.

    curl -XPUT localhost:9200/_cluster/settings -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{
  "transient" :{
      "cluster.routing.allocation.exclude._ip" : "x.x.x.x"
   }
}'

The number of cluster nodes still remain 4 instead of 3. Am i missing some step to remove a node from cluster?

2

You should have 3 master nodes.

The command you sent does not remove a node.
It excludes the node from shard allocation.

If you want to remove the node, just stop it.

3

The data nodes are master-eligible. Yes, stopping it did the trick. Thanks!