The S3 repository is a part of the Elasticsearch AWS plugin, so to use S3 as the repository for snapshotting, we need to install the plugin first:

bin/plugin -install elasticsearch/elasticsearch-cloud-aws/2.4.0

After installing the plugin on every Elasticsearch node in the cluster, we need to alter their configuration (the elasticsearch.yml file) so that the AWS access information is available. The example configuration can look like this:

cloud:
  aws:         
    access_key: YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
    secret_key: YOUT_SECRET_KEY

To create the S3 repository that Elasticsearch will use for snapshotting, we need to run a command similar to the following one:

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/_snapshot/s3_repository' -d '{
 "type": "s3",
 "settings": {
  "bucket": "bucket_name"
 }
}'

The following settings are supported when defining an S3-based repository:

In addition to the preceding properties, we are allowed to set two additional properties that can overwrite the credentials stored in elasticserch.yml, which will be used to connect to S3. This is especially handy when you want to use several S3 repositories—each with its own security settings:

If you use Hadoop and its HDFS (http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/HDFS) filesystem, a good alternative to back up the Elasticsearch data is to store it in your Hadoop cluster. As with the case of S3, there is a dedicated plugin for this. To install it, we can use the following command:

bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/elasticsearch-repository-hdfs/2.0.2

Note that there is an additional plugin version that supports Version 2 of Hadoop. In this case, we should append hadoop2 to the plugin name in order to be able to install the plugin. So for Hadoop 2, our command that installs the plugin would look as follows:

bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/elasticsearch-repository-hdfs/2.0.2-hadoop2

There is also a lite version that can be used in a situation where Hadoop is installed on the system with Elasticsearch. In this case, the plugin does not contain Hadoop libraries and are already available to Elasticsearch. To install the lite version of the plugin, the following command can be used:

bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/elasticsearch-repository-hdfs/2.0.2-light

After installing the plugin on each Elasticsearch (no matter which version of the plugin was used) and restarting the cluster, we can use the following command to create a repository in our Hadoop cluster:

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/_snapshot/hdfs_repository' -d '{
 "type": "hdfs"
 "settings": {
  "path": "snapshots"
 }
}'

The available settings that we can use are as follows:

The last of the repositories we wanted to mention is Microsoft's Azure cloud. Just like Amazon S3, we are able to use a dedicated plugin to push our indices and metadata to Microsoft cloud services. To do this, we need to install a plugin, which we can do by running the following command:

bin/plugin -install elasticsearch/elasticsearch-cloud-azure/2.4.0

The configuration is also similar to the Amazon S3 plugin configuration. Our elasticsearch.yml file should contain the following section:

cloud:
  azure:         
    storage_account: YOUR_ACCOUNT
    storage_key: YOUT_SECRET_KEY

After Elasticsearch is configured, we need to create the actual repository, which we do by running the following command:

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/_snapshot/azure_repository' -d '{
 "type": "azure"
}'

The following settings are supported by the Elasticsearch Azure plugin: