While Index Shard Allocation provides per-index settings to control the allocation of shards to nodes, cluster-level shard allocation filtering allows you to allow or disallow the allocation of shards from any index to particular nodes.

The available dynamic cluster settings are as follows, where {attribute} refers to an arbitrary node attribute.:

These special attributes are also supported:

The typical use case for cluster-wide shard allocation filtering is when you want to decommission a node, and you would like to move the shards from that node to other nodes in the cluster before shutting it down.

For instance, we could decommission a node using its IP address as follows:

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "transient" : {
    "cluster.routing.allocation.exclude._ip" : "10.0.0.1"
  }
}

Shards will only be relocated if it is possible to do so without breaking another routing constraint, such as never allocating a primary and replica shard to the same node.

In addition to listing multiple values as a comma-separated list, all attribute values can be specified with wildcards, eg:

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "transient": {
    "cluster.routing.allocation.exclude._ip": "192.168.2.*"
  }
}