# Is there an opposite of the "shrink" ISM policy? (i.e: to grow the number of shards)

**URL:** <https://forum.opensearch.org/t/is-there-an-opposite-of-the-shrink-ism-policy-i-e-to-grow-the-number-of-shards/15899>\
**Category:** General Feedback\
**Created:** [September 15, 2023, 8:03pm UTC](https://forum.opensearch.org/t/is-there-an-opposite-of-the-shrink-ism-policy-i-e-to-grow-the-number-of-shards/15899 "2023-09-15T20:03:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![raviagr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2acd7d/32.png) [@raviagr](https://forum.opensearch.org/u/raviagr)\
**Post date:** [September 15, 2023, 8:03pm UTC](https://forum.opensearch.org/t/is-there-an-opposite-of-the-shrink-ism-policy-i-e-to-grow-the-number-of-shards/15899/1 "2023-09-15T20:03:38Z")

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I’d like to automatically increase the number of shards in my cluster when the index size becomes too big. I cannot use ISM rollover because it requires only 1 write index, I saw “shrink” which seems to do the opposite of what I need. Is there a “grow”? Or, could I cheat “shrink” and use it to increase the number of shards instead? Will appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.

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**Author:** ![gaobinlong](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.opensearch.org/gaobinlong/32/5242_2.png) [@gaobinlong](https://forum.opensearch.org/u/gaobinlong)\
**Post date:** [September 18, 2023, 8:53am UTC](https://forum.opensearch.org/t/is-there-an-opposite-of-the-shrink-ism-policy-i-e-to-grow-the-number-of-shards/15899/2 "2023-09-18T08:53:01Z")

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The opposite of `Shrink` is `Split`, but currently ISM doesn’t contain split action, and you cannot use shrink action to increase the number of shards of your index, it will fail. Maybe you can open an issue in this repo: [Issues · opensearch-project/index-management · GitHub](https://github.com/opensearch-project/index-management/issues)

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**Author:** ![raviagr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2acd7d/32.png) [@raviagr](https://forum.opensearch.org/u/raviagr)\
**Post date:** [September 18, 2023, 12:34pm UTC](https://forum.opensearch.org/t/is-there-an-opposite-of-the-shrink-ism-policy-i-e-to-grow-the-number-of-shards/15899/3 "2023-09-18T12:34:57Z")

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Thanks for your reply! It seems that split only works on read-only indexes, but otherwise yes, that’d work if it were part of ISM. I’ll create an issue, thanks