Signal Media's blog post by Joachim Draeger outlines the company's journey to optimize its Elasticsearch cluster, a critical component of their platform for indexing and searching millions of documents daily. Initially struggling with high costs and performance issues due to a rapidly expanding content base, they engaged with Elastic's community and support to refine their approach. Key strategies included upgrading Elasticsearch versions, adopting automation tools like Terraform and Packer, implementing a blue-green deployment strategy, and optimizing data sharding practices. By reducing the number of shards and utilizing AWS's i3 instances with enhanced I/O capabilities, Signal Media significantly improved performance and halved their infrastructure costs, all while maintaining a robust 24/7 operational environment. This evolution demonstrates the importance of continuous learning and adaptation in leveraging Elasticsearch's capabilities effectively.