Elasticsearch OpenSearch Routing

By Opster Team

Updated: Aug 29, 2023

| 1 min read

Overview

What is OpenSearch routing?

In OpenSearch, routing refers to document routing. When you index a document, OpenSearch will determine which shard the document should be routed to for indexing.

The shard is selected based on the following formula:

shard = hash(_routing) % number_of_primary_shards

Where the default value of _routing is _id.
It is important to know which shard the document is routed to because OpenSearch will need to determine where to find that document later on for document retrieval requests. 

Examples

In twitter index with 2 primary shards, the document with _id equal to “440” gets routed to the shard number:   

shard = hash( 440 ) % 2
PUT twitter/_doc/440
{
...
}

Notes and good things to know

  • In order to improve search speed, you can create custom routing. For example, you can enable custom routing that will ensure that only a single shard will be queried (the shard that contains your data).
  • To create custom routing in OpenSearch, you will need to configure and define that not all routing will be completed by default settings. ( v <= 5.0)
PUT my_index/customer/_mapping
{
   "order":{
      "_routing":{
         "required":true
      }
   }
}
  •  This will ensure that every document in the “customer” type must specify a custom routing. 

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