This post is older than a year. Consider some information might not be accurate anymore.
There will come a time when you need to perform a rolling restart of your cluster—keeping the cluster online and operational, but taking nodes offline one at a time. .. By nature, Elasticsearch wants your data to be fully replicated and evenly balanced. If you shut down a single node for maintenance, the cluster will immediately recognize the loss of a node and begin rebalancing.
Disable shard allocation. This prevents Elasticsearch from rebalancing missing shards until you tell it otherwise.
curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/_cluster/settings' -d '{
"transient" : {
"cluster.routing.allocation.enable" : "none"
}
}'
Reenable shard allocation as follows:
curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/_cluster/settings' -d '{
"transient" : {
"cluster.routing.allocation.enable" : "all"
}
}'
