Elasticsearch / Cluster Health Interview Questions 2026
Published July 22, 2026 · Updated July 22, 2026
9 Elasticsearch / Cluster Health interview questions from General, Amazon and more. Real questions from Technical, System Design, and HR rounds.
9 questions
Companies: General, Amazon
All Elasticsearch / Cluster Health Questions
General
Hard
System Design round
4-8 years
Your Elasticsearch index is 500GB but only 10GB of data is actually queried (hot data from last 7 days). Cold data from older dates slows down all searches. How do you architect this?
↑ 58 upvotes · 46 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Medium
Screening round
2-5 years
Explain the difference between a term query and a match query in Elasticsearch. When does using a match query on an exact-match field cause incorrect results?
↑ 57 upvotes · 45 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Hard
Scenario round
4-8 years
You're indexing 1 million documents per hour into Elasticsearch. Indexing is slow and search performance degrades during indexing. How do you fix this?
↑ 56 upvotes · 44 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Hard
Scenario round
3-7 years
Your Elasticsearch query returns results in 200ms but users see 2 seconds because the frontend waits for all 20 facets to load. How do you optimize this?
↑ 55 upvotes · 43 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Medium
Screening round
3-6 years
Your Elasticsearch cluster has 3 nodes. One node goes down. Searches return partial results (yellow status). Why not red? What's the difference?
↑ 54 upvotes · 42 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Medium
Screening round
2-5 years
What is the difference between Elasticsearch index mapping types and when would you use keyword vs text field?
↑ 42 upvotes · 40 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Hard
Technical round
3-6 years
Implement a search with Elasticsearch that: filters by category, full-text searches by name, and ranks by relevance + recency.
↑ 41 upvotes · 39 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Medium
Screening round
3-6 years
Your Elasticsearch cluster has 3 nodes. You create an index with 5 primary shards and 1 replica each. How many shards total and how are they distributed?
↑ 40 upvotes · 38 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Hard
Screening round
3-6 years
Explain how Elasticsearch inverted index works. Why is it faster than SQL LIKE queries for full-text search?
↑ 39 upvotes · 37 engineers asked this · SDE2
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Frequently asked questions
Your Elasticsearch index is 500GB but only 10GB of data is actually queried (hot data from last 7 days). Cold data from older dates slows down all searches. How do you architect this?
Your Elasticsearch index is 500GB but only 10GB of data is actually queried (hot data from last 7 days). Cold data from older dates slows down all searches. How do you architect this?
Explain the difference between a term query and a match query in Elasticsearch. When does using a match query on an exact-match field cause incorrect results?
Explain the difference between a term query and a match query in Elasticsearch. When does using a match query on an exact-match field cause incorrect results?
You're indexing 1 million documents per hour into Elasticsearch. Indexing is slow and search performance degrades during indexing. How do you fix this?
You're indexing 1 million documents per hour into Elasticsearch. Indexing is slow and search performance degrades during indexing. How do you fix this?
Your Elasticsearch query returns results in 200ms but users see 2 seconds because the frontend waits for all 20 facets to load. How do you optimize this?
Your Elasticsearch query returns results in 200ms but users see 2 seconds because the frontend waits for all 20 facets to load. How do you optimize this?
Your Elasticsearch cluster has 3 nodes. One node goes down. Searches return partial results (yellow status). Why not red? What's the difference?
Your Elasticsearch cluster has 3 nodes. One node goes down. Searches return partial results (yellow status). Why not red? What's the difference?