Many Open Distro for Elasticsearch users manage data life cycle in their clusters by creating an index based on a standard time period, usually one index per day. This pattern has many advantages: ingest tools like Logstash support index rollover out of the box; defining a retention window is straightforward; and deleting old data is as simple as dropping an index.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/blog/open%20distro%20for%20elasticsearch%20updates/2009/08/Use-Elasticsearchs-_rollover-API-For-Efficient-Storage-Distribution/