I didn’t mean that Crate.IO goes corrupt (because it never does! 
).. but the EC2 instances have been known to become unstable in rare occasions 
(I think this is even mentioned somewhere in the AWS docs)
Jokes aside.. and thanks for addressing all my questions , it seems like I’ve overestimated the importance of the cluster.intial_master_nodes property.
I guess, I can relatively easy determine if the EC2 instance powering up atm by the Autoscaling group is the very first one, and if it is, I could to set to it a specific node name, or even its own IP address.
The rest of nodes simply wouldn’t have that cluster.intial_master_nodes property set at all, and we should be good, right?
One more question please, related to the data directory: If I decide, in future, to have more than three nodes in my cluster, that means that I have to change the properties gateway.expected_nodes and gateway.recover_after_nodes. But, can I do that just like that and then restart my nodes? Will they still be able to re-join the cluster, without deleting the data directory of course? I’m assuming yes, but just to double-check
I’m referring of course to these comments:
Thanks