I haven't used this yet, but it seems like it should make updating mappings much easier. See the "using aliases for greater flexibility" section in this article: http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/changing-mapping-with-zero...
I had to write the scripts to implement this concept myself and it wasn't a quick and easy task. It would had gone along a lot easier if I was able to abstract away some of those queries with a tool like this.