Does adding a field re-index all fields for all documents?

Question

I have a large CloudSearch domain (5m documents) with three indexed fields.

I want to set the default search field to a new empty field (as per). If I add this field do all fields in existing documents get re-indexed?

I want to be careful because I don't want to incur a large fee when re-indexing.

Answer 1

When you add a new field, all documents (and the fields in them) get reindexed. There's no way to avoid this unfortunately.

It's mentioned here in the docs as well as on the pricing page.