The best configuration approaches vary depending on the hardware you are using. The Elasticsearch cluster is a group of connected nodes, and its power relies on the distribution of tasks across these nodes. There are four types of node:
- Data nodes, which store and handle data
- Master nodes, which manage and configure cluster-wide actions
- Client nodes, which send requests to data or master nodes, according to the type of request
- Ingest nodes, which preprocess documents before indexing
As we saw in the previous sections, a node is automatically indexed and has a unique identifier. There are two types of cluster configuration for Elasticsearch: cloud and on-site configuration.