A voting-only master-eligible node is a node that can participate in master elections but will not act
as a master in the cluster. In particular, a voting-only node can help elect another master-eligible
node as master, and can serve as a tiebreaker in elections. High availability (HA) clusters require at
least three master-eligible nodes, so that if one of the three nodes is down, then the remaining two
can still elect a master amongst them-selves. This only requires one of the two remaining nodes to
have the capability to act as master, but both need to have voting powers. This means that one of
the three master-eligible nodes can be made as voting-only. If this voting-only node is a dedicated
master, a less powerful machine or a smaller heap-size can be chosen for this node. Alternatively, a
voting-only non-dedicated master node can play the role of the third master-eligible node, which
allows running an HA cluster with only two dedicated master nodes.
Closes#14340
Co-authored-by: David Turner <david.turner@elastic.co>
Yannick Welsch