When a node is running, a lot of services are managed by its instance. Services provide additional functionalities to a node and they cover different behaviors such as networking, indexing, analyzing, and so on.
Starting an Elasticsearch node, a lot of output will be prompted; this output is provided during services start up. Every Elasticsearch server, that is running, provides services.
Elasticsearch natively provides a large set of functionalities that can be extended with additional plugins.
During a node startup, a lot of required services are automatically started. The most important ones are:
Cluster services: This helps you to manage the cluster state and intra node communication and synchronization
Indexing service: This helps you to manage all the index operations, initializing all active indices and shards
Mapping service: This helps you to manage the document types stored in the cluster (we'll discuss mapping in Chapter 3, Managing Mappings)
Network services: This includes services such as HTTP REST services (default on port
9200
), and internal ES protocol (port9300
), if the thrift plugin is installedPlugin service: (We will discuss in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup, for installation and Chapter 12, User Interfaces for detail usage)
Aggregation services: This provides advanced analytics on stored Elasticsearch documents such as statistics, histograms, and document grouping
Ingesting services: This provides support for document preprocessing before ingestion such as field enrichment, NLP processing, types conversion, and automatic field population
Language scripting services: This allows adding new language scripting support to Elasticsearch