[[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].

[float]
==== 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-classic,Azure Classic discovery>>::

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

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

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

<<discovery-file,File-based discovery>>::

The File-based discovery plugin allows providing the unicast hosts list through a dynamically updatable file.

[float]
==== Community contributed discovery plugins

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

* https://github.com/shikhar/eskka[eskka Discovery Plugin] (by Shikhar Bhushan)
* https://github.com/fabric8io/elasticsearch-cloud-kubernetes[Kubernetes Discovery Plugin] (by Jimmi Dyson, http://fabric8.io[fabric8])

include::discovery-ec2.asciidoc[]

include::discovery-azure-classic.asciidoc[]

include::discovery-gce.asciidoc[]

include::discovery-file.asciidoc[]