Elasticsearch Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

• Start with query patterns, relevance requirements, data freshness, and retention.
• Treat mapping, analyzer, shard count, and indexing strategy as architectural choices.
• Optimize for predictable operations, not demo-search quality only.
• Distinguish logging/observability use-cases from user-facing search needs.

Default Standards

• Mappings should be explicit on important fields.
• Shards are not free; oversharding is an operational tax.
• Relevance tuning requires representative queries and evaluation, not intuition.
• Observe indexing throughput, search latency, heap pressure, GC, and shard health.

References