ElasticSearch Professional Standards & Competencies 4

Question 1

An Elasticsearch engineer is reviewing a colleague's pull request that removes the 'read' privilege from a role and grants 'all' instead. What is the professional concern?

Accepted Answer

Granting 'all' violates least-privilege and increases the blast radius if the account is compromised

Answer

Least-privilege is a foundational security principle; granting 'all' instead of 'read' unnecessarily expands the attack surface.

Question 2

Which Elasticsearch competency is demonstrated by correctly interpreting a 'circuit_breaking_exception' error?

Accepted Answer

JVM heap memory is exhausted and Elasticsearch is protecting itself from an OutOfMemoryError

Answer

Circuit breakers prevent JVM OutOfMemoryErrors by rejecting requests that would exceed configured memory limits, and understanding this guides heap tuning.

Question 3

A professional standard for Elasticsearch deployments requires that all inter-node communication be encrypted. Which setting enforces this?

Accepted Answer

xpack.security.transport.ssl.enabled: true

Answer

Setting xpack.security.transport.ssl.enabled to true enforces TLS on the transport layer used for all inter-node Elasticsearch communication.

Question 4

When an Elasticsearch cluster disk usage exceeds the flood-stage watermark, what professional action is required immediately?

Accepted Answer

Free disk space or add capacity, then reset index.blocks.read_only_allow_delete on affected indices

Answer

Elasticsearch sets indices to read-only at the flood-stage watermark; resolving disk pressure and then clearing the read-only block restores write access.

Question 5

What is the professional purpose of using Index Lifecycle Management (ILM) in Elasticsearch?

Accepted Answer

To automate the movement of indices through hot, warm, cold, and delete phases based on age or size policies

Answer

ILM automates index lifecycle transitions—rollover, shrink, freeze, and delete—reducing operational burden and storage costs.

ElasticSearch Practice Test

ElasticSearch Practice Test

ElasticSearch Professional Standards & Competencies 4