Assign roles to hostsedit

Assigning roles might be required after you install Elastic Cloud Enterprise on hosts to make sure the new hosts can be used for their intended purpose and to remove roles from the initial host to implement a recommended ECE installation. Similarly, if you need more processing capacity for Elasticsearch nodes in your deployment, change the role of a new runner to allocator to add its capacity to your installation.

These steps describe how to assign roles from the Cloud UI. For automation purposes, assigning roles with a token you generate is preferred.

Each Elastic Cloud Enterprise runner can take on several roles:

allocator
Allocates the available computing resources to Elasticsearch nodes or Kibana instances. In larger installations, a majority of the machines will be allocators.
coordinator
Serves as a distributed coordination system and resource scheduler.
proxy
Manages communication between a user and an Elasticsearch or Kibana instance.
director
Manages the ZooKeeper datastore. This role is typically shared with the coordinator role. In production deployments it can be separated from a coordinator.

Once the director role is assigned to a runner, the Zookeeper service starts on that host. The Zookeeper service continues even after the director role is removed from the runner. Therefore, if you remove the director role from any host that has ever had it, we highly recommend also deleting the runner and re-installing it.

Each role is associated with a set of Docker containers that provide the specific functionality.

There are some additional roles shown in the Cloud UI, such as the beats-runner and services-forwarder roles, that are required by Elastic Cloud Enterprise and that you cannot modify.

To assign roles to hosts:

  1. Log into the Cloud UI.
  2. From the Platform menu, select Hosts.

    The roles for each host are shown.

    Narrow the list by name, ID, or choose from several other filters. To further define the list, use a combination of filters.

  3. To update the roles, select the host IP address and then choose Manage roles from the Manage host menu.
  4. Select the role assignments for the host and choose Update roles.

Elastic Cloud Enterprise automatically starts managing the node in its new role and makes it available for use.