Would be a good idea to turn all data nodes into non-eligible masters?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

Actually I have a cluster with 4 master nodes and 10 data nodes on a Kubernetes Cluster. Basically, each node causes my cluster to scale new hosts because of the anti-affinity default behavior, so my k8s got 14 nodes too. I was thinking about how to downsize my Elasticsearch cluster (and consequently my k8s cluster) and a idea I had was to deploy the stack with 3 (or even 2) master nodes and promote the 10 data nodes to non-eligible master, in addiction to their other roles. I guess that many voting nodes could prevent a split brain scenario, because at any time, even with no communication between 2 master nodes, the other nodes would vote and get into a consensus about which one is the master.

Is that a advisable step or shouldn't I do it?

I saw this related question but the asker was talking about turning all data nodes into eligible master nodes, which I know is not the best idea because of the risk of a highly demanded data node being elected as the cluster master and not having enough resources to act as a master.

2

Welcome to our community! :smiley:

Take a look at Voting configurations | Elasticsearch Guide [8.7] | Elastic for some commentary about using an even number of master eligible nodes.

TLDR - uneven numbers are better for master eligible counts and it's totally ok to make the others data only.

1 Like
3

I do not see the point in this and don't think you should ever have more than one voting-only master node (if any). I would instead recommend setting up 3 small dedicated master nodes that you do not scale in or out and then only adjust the number of dedicated data nodes

1 Like
4

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.