The Big Data in Real World team spams the delete button:
Shutting down a node abruptly is not the right way to decommission or remove a node from the Elasticsearch cluster. Doing so will cause your shards which are replicated to go down in replication and it could cause disruption to the clients who are currently consuming data from Elasticsearch.
Proper way to decommission or remove a node from Elasticsearch is to add the host to the exclusion list.
Click through to learn how to do this.