Multitenancy with spring-data-elasticsearch

Question

Is there any way to make spring-data-elasticsearch to work for multitenant application?

I've made it to work without multitenancy, but I don't know how can I have multiple indices or multiple nodes for each tenant? I want to know if there is any way to define different index name for each tenant or to add transient property in my entity class which is annotated properly with @Document(...). When I tried to do that problem was that @Transient is also marked in ElasticSearchRepository. Any idea?

Answer 1

Here's the solution I made to this problem. By default, We would add an index with our POJO annotation of @Document which is okay.However there are cases where we would want to have differen indexes per client so I decided to create them myself. I've used the ElasticSearch Template to create indexes for different tenants rather than relying on Spring Data ElasticSearch repo for saving. Here's what I did

    IndexQuery indexQuery = new IndexQueryBuilder()
                        .withId("ID")
                        .withIndexName("yourtenant")
                        .withType("yourtype")
                        .withObject(obj)
                        .build();

    es.index(indexQuery)

Answer 2

First you've got to understand how Elasticsearch (and especially Lucene) store your data.

Elasticsearch's naming convention "index" and "type" is a bit misleading and most likely not what you first thought!

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If you create a type (id, field1, field2) within an index in Elasticsearch, it will create something similar to a SQL Table:

id     | field1 | field2
-------------------------
string | int    | boolean

What you might not expect is, what happens when you add a second type (id, type2field) to that index. The index mapping will become:

id     | field1 | field2  | type2field
--------------------------------------
string | int    | boolean | string

This happens, because there's no type mapping - even if Elasticsearch will make it look like that. There's only a mapping at index level! This way, you will most likely end up having a lot of empty fields.

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Though in general and especially for a multi tenency setup, you should create an index per class - not type! You should use the type for separating similar shaped data, i.e. use types for your tenants. Or add an additional field to your mapping for identifying the tenant.

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Read more about it here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/mapping.html#_type_takeaways