I’ve published my first Elasticsearch course. I talk and wave my hands about while explaining how we (hypothetically) could have built (some of) Elasticsearch ourselves.

I also discuss three very important shard-related questions to answer when managing a cluster, and run some experiments to show how the number of primary shards affects indexing rate.

This approach helps people grasp what shards really are, how they factor into a cluster, and why they’re so important yet overlooked. I’ve worked with lots of people who don’t have any real knowledge of what a shard is, how many primary shards to use for an index, or how they affect cluster performance. I made this course to address that gap so I’ve got somewhere to refer people to.

In traditional Developer fashion, I massively underestimated the amount of work involved in doing this, now have a much clearer idea of what the problem really is, and - while still happy with the result - would like to completely re-do the whole thing at some stage!

You can enroll here. The next course - Elasticsearch Engineer Essentials - will take you from ‘getting by’ with Elasticsearch, to Elastic Certified Engineer, and beyond! Recording starts next week. Keep an eye out here for that.