[[modules-tribe]]
== Tribe node

The _tribes_ feature allows a _tribe node_ to act as a federated client across
multiple clusters.

WARNING: This feature is EXPERIMENTAL -- use at your own risk.

The tribe node works by retrieving the cluster state from all connected
clusters and merging them into a global cluster state. With this information
at hand, it is able to perform read and write operations against the nodes in
all clusters as if they were local.

The `elasticsearch.yml` config file for a tribe node just needs to list the
clusters that should be joined, for instance:

[source,yaml]
--------------------------------
tribe:
    t1: <1>
        cluster.name:   cluster_one
    t2: <1>
        cluster.name:   cluster_two
--------------------------------
<1> `t1` and `t2` are aribitrary names representing the connection to each
    cluster.

The example above configures connections to two clusters, name `t1` and `t2`
respectively.  The tribe node will create a <<modules-node,node client>> to
connect each cluster using <<multicast,multicast discovery>> by default. Any
other settings for the connection can be configured under `tribe.{name}`, just
like the `cluster.name` in the example.

The merged global cluster state means that almost all operations work in the
same way as a single cluster: distributed search, suggest, percolation,
indexing, etc.

However, there are a few exceptions:

* The merged view cannot handle indices with the same name in multiple
  clusters. It will pick one of them and discard the other.

* Master level read operations (eg <<cluster-state>>, <<cluster-health>>)
  need to have the `local` flag set to `true` as the tribe node does not
  have a single master node.

* Master level write operations (eg <<indices-create-index>>) are not
  allowed. These should be performed on a single cluster.

The tribe node can be configured to block all write operations and all
metadata operations with:

[source,yaml]
--------------------------------
tribe:
    blocks:
        write:    true
        metadata: true
--------------------------------

