Falling behind when there are too many nodes to refresh...

[rtyley]

Our team currently has two big-ish Elasticsearch clusters - Elasticsearch 6 & Elasticsearch 7, and that ends up being a lot of ES nodes - about 50 nodes or so. Our current node rotation schedule is failing to keep up:

This is because:

• Even with "indices.recovery.max_bytes_per_sec" : "256mb" set, migrating all the data off a node can take nearly an hour.
• Ideally, we won't be auto-running node rotations during business hours (eg because it can interfere with manual developer work on the cluster)
• When node-rotation is automatically run, it's nice if it happens just before developers start work so they can be around to look at any fallout relatively soon.
• The above means our RotationCronExpression is currently cron(10 4-10 ? * MON-FRI *) (try hourly between 4am to 10am on weekdays)- but this offers only 35 rotations per week, which is not enough to keep up with 50 nodes.

We can widen that rotation period, but precisely scaling cron schedules is quite fiddly (eg currently, we have to be very careful to make sure they are never more frequent than the slowest possible migration). It would be nice to have a better way to scale this...

Let's respect ageThresholdInDays - don't stop until all nodes are younger

Thanks to https://github.com/guardian/elasticsearch-node-rotation/pull/68, we now have the ageThresholdInDays parameter (for Ophan, it is 7 days). At the moment it just means:

Don't rotate any node that is younger than ageThresholdInDays

How about if instead it meant:

The Step Function will not terminate until all nodes are younger than ageThresholdInDays

...then, rather than scheduling the Step Function to run multiple times a day, we could just cron it to run once per day.

How can the ENR Step Function achieve that?

A few options:

• Just loop around the whole function, not terminating until that terminating ageThresholdInDays condition has been achieved.
• Rotate more nodes at a time - all the nodes older than ageThresholdInDays!

[twrichards]

how about we add another step to the end of the process, which checks if there are further nodes to rotate (that meet the criteria) and kicks off another instance of itself (the step function) - that way each rotation has its own step function invocation - making debugging easier.

[twrichards]

this proposed behaviour could be configurable via the input event, perhaps with an optional maxRotations (defaults to one, if not present) then the schedule could be set to say 10 in your case (given 5 weekdays)

[twrichards]

also, this seems to be a dupe of https://github.com/guardian/elasticsearch-node-rotation/issues/34