Today we require users to prepare their indices for split operations.
Yet, we can do this automatically when an index is created which would
make the split feature a much more appealing option since it doesn't have
any 3rd party prerequisites anymore.
This change automatically sets the number of routinng shards such that
an index is guaranteed to be able to split once into twice as many shards.
The number of routing shards is scaled towards the default shard limit per index
such that indices with a smaller amount of shards can be split more often than
larger ones. For instance an index with 1 or 2 shards can be split 10x
(until it approaches 1024 shards) while an index created with 128 shards can only
be split 3x by a factor of 2. Please note this is just a default value and users
can still prepare their indices with `index.number_of_routing_shards` for custom
splitting.
NOTE: this change has an impact on the document distribution since we are changing
the hash space. Documents are still uniformly distributed across all shards but since
we are artificually changing the number of buckets in the consistent hashign space
document might be hashed into different shards compared to previous versions.
This is a 7.0 only change.
This change adds a new `_split` API that allows to split indices into a new
index with a power of two more shards that the source index. This API works
alongside the `_shrink` API but doesn't require any shard relocation before
indices can be split.
The split operation is conceptually an inverse `_shrink` operation since we
initialize the index with a _syntetic_ number of routing shards that are used
for the consistent hashing at index time. Compared to indices created with
earlier versions this might produce slightly different shard distributions but
has no impact on the per-index backwards compatibility. For now, the user is
required to prepare an index to be splittable by setting the
`index.number_of_routing_shards` at index creation time. The setting allows the
user to prepare the index to be splittable in factors of
`index.number_of_routing_shards` ie. if the index is created with
`index.number_of_routing_shards: 16` and `index.number_of_shards: 2` it can be
split into `4, 8, 16` shards. This is an intermediate step until we can make
this the default. This also allows us to safely backport this change to 6.x.
The `_split` operation is implemented internally as a DeleteByQuery on the
lucene level that is executed while the primary shards execute their initial
recovery. Subsequent merges that are triggered due to this operation will not be
executed immediately. All merges will be deferred unti the shards are started
and will then be throttled accordingly.
This change is intended for the 6.1 feature release but will not support pre-6.1
indices to be split unless these indices have been shrunk before. In that case
these indices can be split backwards into their original number of shards.
Simon Willnauer