Q: Why doesn’t Curator work with AWS Elasticsearch?edit

A: Because Curator requires access to the /_cluster/state/metadata endpoint.edit

AWS ES 5.3 officially supports Curator for index managment operations. AWS ES 5.5 exposes the /_snapshot/_status endpoint Curator uses, and therefore only AWS ES 5.5 supports full snapshot operations. Older versions of AWS ES are not supported by Curator versions 4 or 5.

There is some confusion because Curator 3 supported AWS ES, but Curator 4 & 5 do not. Curator 4 & 5 require access to the /_cluster/state/metadata endpoint in order to pull metadata at IndexList initialization time for all indices. This metadata is used to determine index routing information, index sizing, index state (either open or close), aliases, and more. Curator 4 switched to doing this in order to reduce the number of repetitive client calls that were made in the previous versions. Curator 5 uses the same method.

This endpoint was not fully available in AWS ES until version 5.3. The /_snapshot/_status endpoint was made available in AWS ES 5.5.