Multi tenancy in Elastic Search

Question

We are planning to introduce Elastic search(AWS) for our Multi tenancy application. We have below options,

1. Using One Index Per Tenant
2. Using One Type Per Tenant
3. All Tenants Share One Index with Custom routing

As per this blog https://www.elastic.co/blog/found-multi-tenancy the first option would give memory issue. But not clear about other options.

It seems if we are using the third option then there is no data segregation. Not sure about security.

I believe second option would be better option as data would be segregated.

Help me to identify best option to proceed elastic search with Multi tenancy.

Please note that we would leverage AWS infrastructure.

Answer 1

We are considering the same question right now, and the following set of articles by Elasticsearch was very helpful.

Start here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/scale.html

And read through each subsequent article until you hit this one: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/finite-scale.html

The following two were very eye-opening for me:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/faking-it.html https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/one-big-user.html

The basic takeaway:

• Alias per customer
• Shard routing
• Now you can have indexes for big customers, shared indexes for little customers, and they all appear to be separate indices

Answer 2

This is a too important link not to be mentioned here: http://www.bigeng.io/elasticsearch-scaling-multitenant/

Good architecture dilemmas, and great performance analysis / reasoning.

tldr; they had index groups that are built around shard allocation filtering to segregate load across nodes in the cluster

Answer 3

To sum up accepted answer and other articles,

1. Use a shared index using custom routing using an alias

   1.1) Special case: Big client can have dedicated index, only if needed.

Following article covers many use cases for detailed explanation. https://www.elastic.co/blog/found-multi-tenancy

Following is the conclusion on how you can do it (link source: accepted answer) https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/faking-it.html