The Aliyun ECS Discovery plugin uses the ECS API to identify the addresses of seed hosts. similar to the official EC2 Discovery Plugin.

mvn package -P release

On Elasticsearch v7.5.1:

sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin install -b https://github.com/timonwong/elasticsearch-discovery-ecs/releases/download/v7.5.1.0/elasticsearch-discovery-ecs-7.5.1.0.zip

The plugin must be installed on every node in the cluster, and each node must be restarted after installation.

The plugin can be removed with the following command:

sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin remove elasticsearch-discovery-ecs

The node must be stopped before removing the plugin.

ECS discovery supports a number of settings. Some settings are sensitive and must be stored in the elasticsearch keystore. For example, to use explicit Aliyun access keys:

bin/elasticsearch-keystore add discovery.ecs.access_key
bin/elasticsearch-keystore add discovery.ecs.secret_key

The authentication order:

• Provided access & secret key
• Provided STS token
• Environment variables
• Java properties
• RAM Instance profile

Environment variables, RAM instance profile (automatically detected)

• discovery.ecs.access_key (Secure, reloadable)
• discovery.ecs.secret_key (Secure, reloadable)
• discovery.ecs.session_token (Secure, reloadable)

ECS discovery requires making a call to the ECS service. You’ll want to setup an RAM policy to allow this. You can create a custom policy via the RAM Management Console. It should look similar to this.

{
    "Version": "1",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Action": "ecs:DescribeInstances",
            "Resource": "*",
            "Effect": "Allow"
        }
    ]
}

discovery.ecs.region should be set to the region which elasticsearch runs on.

Here is a short list of available regions:

• Regions in Mainland China
  • cn-qingdao
  • cn-beijing
  • cn-zhangjiakou
  • cn-huhehaote
  • cn-hangzhou
  • cn-shanghai
  • cn-shenzhen
• International regions
  • cn-hongkong
  • ap-southeast-1
  • ap-southeast-2
  • ap-southeast-3
  • ap-southeast-5
  • ap-south-1
  • ap-northeast-1
  • us-west-1
  • us-east-1
  • eu-central-1
  • eu-west-1
  • me-east-1

NOTE: For a complete list of regions, please visit: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/40654.htm

ecs discovery allows to use the ECS APIs to perform automatic discovery (similar to multicast in non hostile multicast environments). Here is a simple sample configuration:

discovery.seed_providers: ecs

The following are a list of settings (prefixed with discovery.ecs) that can further control the discovery:

• groups: Either a comma separated list or array based list of (security) groups. Only instances with the provided security groups will be used in the cluster discovery. (NOTE: You should only provide group ID.)
• host_type: The type of host type to use to communicate with other instances. Can be one of private_ip, public_ip. Defaults to private_ip.
• zone_ids: Either a comma separated list or array based list of zones. Only instances within the provided availability zones will be used in the cluster discovery.
• any_group: If set to false, will require all security groups to be present for the instance to be used for the discovery. Defaults to true.
• node_cache_time: How long the list of hosts is cached to prevent further requests to the ECS API. Defaults to 10s.

The following are also allowed as valid network host settings:

The ecs discovery can also filter machines to include in the cluster based on tags (and not just groups). The settings to use include the discovery.ecs.tag. prefix. For example, setting discovery.ecs.tag.stage to dev will only filter instances with a tag key set to stage, and a value of dev. Several tags set will require all of those tags to be set for the instance to be included.

One practical use for tag filtering is when an ecs cluster contains many nodes that are not running elasticsearch. In this case (particularly with high discovery.zen.ping_timeout values) there is a risk that a new node’s discovery phase will end before it has found the cluster (which will result in it declaring itself master of a new cluster with the same name - highly undesirable). Tagging elasticsearch ecs nodes and then filtering by that tag will resolve this issue.

Though not dependent on actually using ecs as discovery (but still requires the cloud ecs plugin installed), the plugin can automatically add node attributes relating to ecs (for example, availability zone, that can be used with the awareness allocation feature). In order to enable it, set cloud.node.auto_attributes to true in the settings:

cloud.node.auto_attributes: true

discovery.ecs.region: cn-hangzhou

# Automatically set node attribute `alicloud_zone_id`, which can be used to spread replica across availability zones.
# For more information about allocation awareness: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.8/allocation-awareness.html
cloud.node.auto_attributes: true
cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.attributes: alicloud_zone_id

network.bind_host:
  - _ecs:privateIpv4_
  - _local_
network.publish_host: _ecs:privateIpv4_


# Use ecs to zen discovery
discovery.seed_providers: ecs
discovery.ecs.host_type: private_ip
# Seed hosts with tag "ESCluster=test-cluster"
discovery.ecs.tag.ESCluster: test-cluster

This is a derived work from ECS Discovery Plugin.