Understanding node services

When a node is running, a lot of services are managed by its instance. Services provide additional functionalities to a node and they cover different behaviors such as networking, indexing, analyzing, and so on.

Getting ready

Starting an Elasticsearch node, a lot of output will be prompted; this output is provided during services start up. Every Elasticsearch server, that is running, provides services.

How it works...

Elasticsearch natively provides a large set of functionalities that can be extended with additional plugins.

During a node startup, a lot of required services are automatically started. The most important ones are:

• Cluster services: This helps you to manage the cluster state and intra node communication and synchronization

• Indexing service: This helps you to manage all the index operations, initializing all active indices and shards

• Mapping service: This helps you to manage the document types stored in the cluster (we'll discuss mapping in Chapter 3, Managing Mappings)

• Network services: This includes services such as HTTP REST services (default on port 9200), and internal ES protocol (port 9300), if the thrift plugin is installed

• Plugin service: (We will discuss in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup, for installation and Chapter 12, User Interfaces for detail usage)

• Aggregation services: This provides advanced analytics on stored Elasticsearch documents such as statistics, histograms, and document grouping

• Ingesting services: This provides support for document preprocessing before ingestion such as field enrichment, NLP processing, types conversion, and automatic field population

• Language scripting services: This allows adding new language scripting support to Elasticsearch

Tip

Throughout the book, we'll see recipes that interact with Elasticsearch services. Every base functionality or extended functionality is managed in Elasticsearch as a service.