title: Scaling of ElasticSearch
body: <p>I'm searching for information on how ElasticSearch would scale with the amount of data in its indexes and am surprised how little I can find on that topic.  Maybe some experience from the crowd here can help me.</p>
  
  <p>We are currently using CloudSearch to index ≈ 7 million documents; in CloudSearch this results in 2 instances of type m2.xlarge.  We are considering switching to ElasticSearch instead to reduce the cost.  But all I find on the scaling of ElasticSearch is that it does scale well, can be distributed over several instances etc.</p>
  
  <p>But what kind of machine (memory, disc) would I need for this kind of data?</p>
  
  <p>How would that change if I increased the amount of data by the factor of 12 (≈ 80 million documents)?</p>