Stopping Elasticsearch service removes category products in 2.4

Question

I was curious what would happen if I stopped the Elasticsearch service in Magento 2.4. What I found I cant seem to understand.

When the service is stopped it empties all the categories. I would have assumed Elasticsearch was for the mini search/advanced search not the catalog listings.

Can anyone confirm if this is by design or is there a bug in Magento 2.4? Also any ideas on how to fix this?

My setup is Magento 2.4 on Valet (MacOs/PHP 7.3.20). I installed Elasticsearch via Homebrew.

Elasticsearch running

Elasticsearch stopped

Answer 1

ElasticSearch is in charge of the entire catalog and search, provisioning the data to Magento 2.4.

ElasticSearch is a requirement in Magento 2.4, as you can see in the page Magento 2.4 technology stack requirements, so it never can be disabled like in Magento 2.3.

I recommend to set the services to auto-restart in a production server, so if ElasticSearch or MySQL service goes down, it will restart automatically. You can do it in Docker using the parameter below.

docker run --restart=always