How does Elasticsearch scale horizontally across nodes?
The question is about Elasticsearch .
Elasticsearch scales horizontally by distributing index data across multiple shards assigned to different nodes in the cluster. Primary shards handle indexing and search; replica shards provide redundancy and read scaling. Adding new nodes triggers automatic shard rebalancing. Shard count is set at index creation - planning the correct count based on expected data volume is critical, as over-sharding degrades performance significantly.
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