[role="xpack"]
[testenv="platinum"]
[[xpack-autoscaling]]
[chapter]
= Autoscaling

experimental[]

The autoscaling feature enables an operator to configure tiers of nodes that
self-monitor whether or not they need to scale based on an operator-defined
policy. Then, via the autoscaling API, an Elasticsearch cluster can report
whether or not it needs additional resources to meet the policy. For example, an
operator could define a policy that a warm tier should scale on available disk
space. Elasticsearch would monitor and forecast the available disk space in the
warm tier, and if the forecast is such that the cluster will soon not be able to
allocate existing and future shard copies due to disk space, then the
autoscaling API would report that the cluster needs to scale due to disk space.
It remains the responsibility of the operator to add the additional resources
that the cluster signals it requires.
