[RyanZAG]

Is this still a limitation? I haven't run into any use cases where this has been a problem yet. Since the default shards are 10 and 2 replicas, does that not mean each index should be able to scale up to 20 servers? I'd think that if your data grew enough that 1/10th does not fit on a server, you could do a one time maintenance and rebuild all your servers.

I have my doubts mongodb would scale up that well to 20+ servers without some maintenance as well. So I'm not sure how that's really a limitation anyone should use for choosing mongodb or ES. If you're expecting that kind of data, just make a large number of shards in your index creation as it will work fine on fewer servers too?

[ddorian43]

you can grow a little larger than that by using some nodes only for aggregating/handling queries(holding no data/shards)

larger number of shards=slower searching (unless you distribute the shards to multiple nodes)