[[discovery]]
== Discovery Plugins

Discovery plugins extend Elasticsearch by adding new discovery mechanisms that
can be used instead of {ref}/modules-discovery-zen.html[Zen Discovery].

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==== Core discovery plugins

The core discovery plugins are:

<<discovery-ec2,EC2 discovery>>::

The EC2 discovery plugin uses the https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java[AWS API] for unicast discovery.

<<discovery-azure,Azure discovery>>::

The Azure discovery plugin uses the Azure API for unicast discovery.

<<discovery-gce,GCE discovery>>::

The Google Compute Engine discovery plugin uses the GCE API for unicast discovery.

<<discovery-multicast,Multicast>>::

The multicast plugin sends multicast messages to discover other nodes in the cluster.

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==== Community contributed discovery plugins

A number of discovery plugins have been contributed by our community:

* https://github.com/grantr/elasticsearch-srv-discovery[DNS SRV Discovery Plugin] (by Grant Rodgers)
* https://github.com/shikhar/eskka[eskka Discovery Plugin] (by Shikhar Bhushan)
* https://github.com/grmblfrz/elasticsearch-zookeeper[ZooKeeper Discovery Plugin] (by Sonian Inc.)

include::discovery-ec2.asciidoc[]

include::discovery-azure.asciidoc[]

include::discovery-gce.asciidoc[]

include::discovery-multicast.asciidoc[]