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Elasticsearch cluster architecture

Elasticsearch is a distributed, document-oriented search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene.^[600-developer-elasticsearch.md] It is designed for high performance, high availability, and ease of scaling, handling both structured and unstructured data including geographic information.^[600-developer-elasticsearch.md]

Core Concepts

The fundamental unit of data in Elasticsearch is the document, which is analogous to a row in a relational database.^[600-developer-elasticsearch.md] Documents are stored within indices (similar to database tables) and consist of fields (columns) defined by a mapping (schema).^[600-developer-elasticsearch.md]

Architecture

An Elasticsearch cluster is a collection of one or more nodes (servers) that holds data.^[600-developer-elasticsearch.md] To manage large datasets, indices are subdivided into shards.^[600-developer-elasticsearch.md] Sharding allows an index to scale horizontally by splitting its content across multiple nodes, while maintaining high availability through replication.

Sources

^[600-developer-elasticsearch.md]