- Start with configuration of the cluster and its nodes: data, master, and client nodes
- Guesstimate usage pattern: lots of searches, vs. lots of indexing, vs. lots of aggregation
- OS Configuration: number of open file descriptors shall be set to at least 32K-64K
- OS Configuration: disable memory swapping (not always possible in virtual environment)
- Mapping and data-modeling selection: _all, _source, multi-fields
- Search vs Filter - do you need to compute score based on the 'status:active' in your query?
- Use _bulk Api for indexing whenever possible
- Number of replicas and number of shards - reliability and scaling-out
