title: Is using a load balancer with ElasticSearch unnecessary?
body: <p>I have a cluster of 3 ElasticSearch nodes running on AWS EC2.  These nodes are setup using OpsWorks/Chef.  My intent is to design this cluster to be very resilient and elastic (nodes can come in and out when needed).</p>
  
  <p>From everything I've read about ElasticSearch, it seems like no one recommends putting a load balancer in front of the cluster; instead, it seems like the recommendation is to do one of two things:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Point your client at the URL/IP of one node, let ES do the load balancing for you and hope that node never goes down.</p></li>
  <li><p>Hard-code the URLs/IPs of ALL your nodes into your client app and have the app handle the failover logic.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>My background is mostly in web farms where it's just common sense to create a huge pool of autonomous web servers, throw an ELB in front of them and let the load balancer decide what nodes are alive or dead.  Why does ES not seem to support this same architecture?</p>