It is important to back up your data in Elasticsearch regularly to restore the data if a catastrophic event occurs or if you want to revert to a last known healthy state. We will look at how to backup and restore using the snapshot/restore APIs of Elasticsearch in the next section. In order to take regular backups and store them in centralized and resilient data storage, we need to set up a snapshot mechanism. When you are running Elasticsearch in EC2, it makes sense to store snapshots in an AWS S3 bucket.
S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. It is a scalable, durable, and reliable storage service to store large amounts of data. It provides comprehensive security for your data and accessibility from many different platforms. It can meet very stringent compliance requirements due to its comprehensive security support. It is often the preferred solution for storing long-term data, especially when systems that generate the data are hosted on AWS.
The S3 repository plugin can be installed using the following command; it needs to be installed on every node of your Elasticsearch cluster:
sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin install repository-s3