Elasticsearch 6.0 Removal of mapping types - Alternatives - elasticsearch

Question

Background
I migrating my ES index into ES version 6. I currenly stuck because ES6 removed the using on "_type" field.
Old Implementation (ES2)
My software has many users (>100K). Each user has at least one document in ES. So, the hierarchy looks like this:
INDEX -> TYPE -> Document
myindex-> user-123 -> document-1
The key point here is with this structure I can easily remove all the document of specific user.
DELETE /myindex/user-123
(Delete all the document of specific user, with a single command)
The problem
"_type" is no longer supported by ES6.
Possible solution
Instead of using _type, use the index name as USER-ID. So my index will looks like:
"user-123" -> "static-name" -> document
Delete user is done by delete index (instead of delete type in previous implementation).
Questions:
My first worry is about the amount of index and performance: Having like 1M indexes is something that acceptable in terms of performance? don't forget I have to search on them frequently.
Most of my users has small amount of documents stored in ES. Is that make sense to hold a shard, which should be expensive, for < 10 documents?
My data architecture sounds reasonable for you?
Any other tip will be welcome!
Thanks.

Answer 1

I would not have one index per user, it's a waste of resources, especially if there are only 10 docs per user.
What I would do instead is to use filtered aliases, one per user.
So the index would be named users and the type would be a static name, e.g. doc. For user 123, the documents of that user would all be stored in users/doc/xyz and in each document you need to add the user id, e.g.
PUT users/doc/xyz
{
...
"userId": 123,
...
}
Then you can define a filtered alias for all documents of user 123, like this:
POST /_aliases
{
"actions" : [
{
"add" : {
"index" : "users",
"alias" : "user-123",
"filter" : { "term" : { "userId" : "123" } }
}
}
]
}
If you need to delete all documents of user 123, then you can simply do it like this:
POST user-123/_delete_by_query?q=*

Answer 2

Having these many indexes is definitely not a good approach. If your only concern to delete multiple documents with a single command. Then you can use Delete by Query API provided by ElasticSearch
You can introduce "subtype" attribute in all your document containing value for each document like "user-" value. So in your case, document would looks like.
{
"attribute1":"value",
"subtype":"user-123"
}