[jhgg]

Yup. We're thinking about that too. We've been monitoring node performance closely to see when we'll need to shift the topology around a bit. I'd want to keep our clusters small and the topology uniform before I investigate dedicated master nodes though.

[gibrown]

FYI: From my experience (on older ES versions) when you hit problems with it, they will be pretty bad, catastrophic problems. We run dedicated master nodes, but have the master servers running multiple ES instances, so they can serve as masters for multiple clusters.