GET Consistency (and Quorum) in ElasticSearch

Question

I am new to ElasticSearch and I am evaluating it for a project.

In ES, Replication can be sync or async. In case of async, the client is returned success as soon as the document is written to the primary shard. And then the document is pushed to other replicas asynchronously.

When written asynchronously, how do we ensure that when GET is done, data is returned even if it has not propagated to all the replicas. Because when we do a GET in ES, the query is forwarded to one of the replicas of the appropriate shard. Provided we are writing asynchronously, the primary shard may have the document but the selected replica for doingthe GET may not have received/written the document yet. In Cassandra, we can specify consistency levels (ONE, QUORUM, ALL) at the time of writes as well as reads. Is something like that possible for reads in ES?

Answer 1

Right, you can set replication to be async (default is sync) to not wait for the replicas, although in practice this doesn't buy you much.

Whenever you read data you can specify the preference parameter to control where the documents are going to be taken from. If you use preference:_primary you make sure that you always take the document from the primary shard, otherwise, if the get is done before the document is available on all replicas, it might happen that you hit a shard that doesn't have it yet. Given that the get api works in real-time, it usually makes sense to keep replication sync, so that after the index operation returned you can always get back the document by id from any shard that is supposed to contain it. Still, if you try to get back a document while indexing it for the first time, well it can happen that you don't find it.

There is a write consistency parameter in elasticsearch as well, but it is different compared to how other data storages work, and it is not related to whether replication is sync or async. With the consistency parameter you can control how many copies of the data need to be available in order for a write operation to be permissible. If not enough copies of the data are available the write operation will fail (after waiting for up to 1 minute, interval that you can change through the timeout parameter). This is just a preliminary check to decide whether to accept the operation or not. It doesn't mean that if the operation fails on a replica it will be rollbacked. In fact, if a write operation fails on a replica but succeeds on a primary, the assumption is that there is something wrong with the replica (or the hardward it's running on), thus the shard will be marked as failed and recreated on another node. Default value for consistency is quorum, and can also be set to one or all.

That said, when it comes to the get api, elasticsearch is not eventually consistent, but just consistent as once a document is indexed you can retrieve it.

The fact that newly added documents are not available for search till the next refresh operation, which happens every second automatically by default, is not really about eventual consistency (as the documents are there and can be retrieved by id), but more about how search and lucene work and how documents are made visible through lucene.