Bonsai has more safeguards to protect your search cluster’s reliability than any other Elasticsearch provider.
Here is our disaster recovery plan for all clusters on our platform
Whether you’re hosting Elasticsearch on your own or choosing a hosted provider like Bonsai, every search cluster should have a disaster recovery plan.
Bonsai was built from the ground up to be a highly available system. We leverage a variety of best practices from the industry to achieve this. It all starts with the choice of Elasticsearch, which is a highly available search engine with built-in clustering and sharding support. Bonsai deploys all Elasticsearch clusters in a multi-node, multi-data center configuration to guarantee that your data is safe and secure. To further improve the High Availability of your cluster, Bonsai deploys all clusters behind an AWS Application Load Balancer. This allows you to connect to a singular URL, and get access to every node of the cluster through our load balancing algorithm.
All production Bonsai Clusters are deployed to minimum of three nodes for redundancy, and to prevent stalemates in leadership election. Each node in the cluster will be deployed to a separate AWS Availability Zone, giving us data center isolation as well. A Bonsai cluster could experience a complete loss of two AWS data centers, and the cluster will still continue to operate. This makes Bonsai clusters extremely fault-tolerant.
When a Bonsai cluster does experience a node loss, Elasticsearch will automatically reroute the primary and replica shards to machines that are up and running. In the background, AWS Auto Scaling Groups will immediately begin spinning up the replacement instance that will auto-bootstrap into your configured Elasticsearch configuration and version. Once the node has successfully provisioned, it will join the cluster, and then Elasticsearch will offload the relocated shards back to the empty machine.
In the off chance that Bonsai (and much of the internet with it) experiences an entire loss of an AWS EC2 region, all of your cluster’s data is maintained in AWS’s S3 system, which has a reliability guarantee of 99.99% uptime and 99.999999999% durability. If such a failure happens, Bonsai’s staff will work with your team to understand where you will be relocating your application, and can then initiate a restore process into a cluster in the same AWS Region while maintaining your existing DNS connections.