AWS elastic-search. FORBIDDEN/8/index write (api). Unable to write to index

Question

I am trying dump a list of docs to an AWS elastic-search instance. It was running fine. Then, all of sudden it started throwing this error:

{ _index: \'

        

Answer 1

This error is the Amazon ES service actively blocking writes to protect the cluster from reaching red or yellow status. It does this using index.blocks.write.

The two reasons being:

Low Memory

When the JVMMemoryPressure metric exceeds 92% for 30 minutes, Amazon ES triggers a protection mechanism and blocks all write operations to prevent the cluster from reaching red status. When the protection is on, write operations fail with a ClusterBlockException error, new indexes can't be created, and the IndexCreateBlockException error is thrown.

When the JVMMemoryPressure metric returns to 88% or lower for five minutes, the protection is disabled, and write operations to the cluster are unblocked.

Low Disk Space

Elasticsearch has a default "low watermark" of 85%, meaning that once disk usage exceeds 85%, Elasticsearch no longer allocates shards to that node. Elasticsearch also has a default "high watermark" of 90%, at which point it attempts to relocate shards to other nodes.