Document routing is the concept of indexing a document to a particular shard. By default, Elasticsearch tries to evenly distribute the documents among all the shards in an index. For this, it uses the following formula:

shard = hash(routing) % number_of_primary_shards

Here, shard is the shard number in which the document will be indexed and routing is the _id of a document.

We can explicitly specify the routing value while indexing, updating, fetching, or searching data in Elasticsearch. Custom routing yields faster indexing as well as faster searches. However, it is more about designing for scale that we will study in the following chapters.