Running Elasticsearch on AWS - Windows Server [Walk-trough]

[GouravDas]

Unable to find any relevant information for Running Elasticsearch on AWS - Windows Server thus as a gratitude for whether ever I have learnt from this forum, I have jotted down all the relevant steps to run your cluster in AWS for Windows Server.

1. Run min 3 EC2 instances in AWS to form a highly available cluster in same Availability Zone for simplicity [As a best practice it can be run in multiple AZs]. Put all of the instances in the same security group and make sure port no. 9200 & 9300 are allowed in the inbound rule, in the source mention only the subnet of the following Availability Zone, it shouldn’t be opened to the world as a security best practices.
2. Download ElasticSearch for windows from (http://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch) & create similar folder structure in all the instances and keep the zipped file there & extract it.
3. Next we need to configure the elasticsearch.yml which is located inside config folder [Notepad++ recommended]. Kindly do the similar change in all the instances, uncomment the following parameters & write them up accordingly, make sure you mention private IP addr assigned to the instance or else it won’t work.
   cluster.name: dev-cluster
   node.name: ${HOSTNAME}
   network.host: ["0.0.0.0"]
   discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: ["private-ip of node-1", " private-ip of node-2" , “private-ip of node-3”]
   For e.x, discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: ["172.31.56.159", "172.31.54.17" , “172.31.56.119”]
   discovery.zen.minimum_master_nodes: 2
4. Disable Windows Defender Firewall from control panel in all the EC2 instances.
5. Run the cluster one by one by from command prompt by using the following cmd “ElasticSearchPath\bin\elasticsearch.bat”
6. To check if all the nodes are added to the cluster or not , run the following in any web browser localhost:9200/_cluster/health?pretty
7. Common issues, if you get following error [o.e.d.z.ZenDiscovery ] [node-name] failed to send join request to master , kindly stop cluster service in all the instances , delete the data folder from all the instances and re-start the service one-by-one.
8. Thanks for reading.

[warkolm (Mark Walkom)]

We wouldn't recommend disabling the firewall entirely.

@GouravDas

if you get following error [o.e.d.z.ZenDiscovery ] [node-name] failed to send join request to master , kindly stop cluster service in all the instances , delete the data folder from all the instances and re-start the service one-by-one.

You shouldn't need to do this. Perhaps if you share some logs we can find a better way.