ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException may be thrown while creating a transport message

Certain sequences of writes and seeks to the buffer used to create a transport message may encounter an alignment bug which results in an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, preventing the transport message from being sent.

This issue is fixed in 8.8.0.

Shard rebalancing may temporarily unbalance cluster

From 8.6.0 onwards the default shard rebalancing algorithm will compute the final desired balance and then make shard movements to reconcile the current state of the cluster with the desired state. However the order in which the shard movements take place may be skewed towards certain nodes, causing the cluster to become temporarily unbalanced while the reconciliation is ongoing. As always, once a node reaches a disk watermark it will not accept any additional shards, but this skew may result in nodes reaching their disk watermarks more often than expected in normal operation. Once the reconciliation process completes, the cluster will be balanced again.

To avoid this problem, upgrade to 8.8.0 or later.