Enable cross-cluster search and cross-cluster replicationedit

Cross-cluster search (CCS) allows you to configure multiple remote clusters across different locations and to enable federated search queries across all of the configured remote clusters.

Cross-cluster replication (CCR) allows you to replicate indices across multiple remote clusters regardless of where they’re located. This provides tremendous benefit in scenarios of disaster recovery or data locality.

These remote clusters could be:

  • Another Elasticsearch cluster of your Elastic Cloud organization across any region or cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure…​)
  • An Elasticsearch cluster of another Elastic Cloud organization
  • An Elasticsearch cluster in an Elastic Cloud Enterprise installation
  • Any other self-managed Elasticsearch cluster

Prerequisitesedit

To use CCS or CCR, your deployments must meet the following criteria:

  • To use CCS, local and remote clusters must be version 6.7.x or higher.
  • To use CCR, local and remote clusters must be at version 6.8.9 or higher (in the 6.x branch), or 7.7.1 or higher (in the 7.x branch).
  • Local and remote clusters must be in compatible versions. Review the Elasticsearch version compatibility table.

The steps, information, and authentication method required to configure CCS and CCR can vary depending on where the clusters you want to use as remote are hosted.

Enable CCR and the Remote Clusters UI in Kibanaedit

If your deployment was created before February 2021, CCR won’t be enabled by default and you won’t find the Remote Clusters UI in Kibana even though your deployment meets all the criteria.

To enable these features, go to the Security page of your deployment and under Trust management select Enable CCR.

CCR is not supported for indices used by Enterprise Search.

Remote clusters and traffic filteringedit

Traffic filtering isn’t supported for cross-cluster operations initiated from an Elastic Cloud Enterprise environment to a remote Elasticsearch Service deployment.

For remote clusters configured using TLS certificate authentication, traffic filtering can be enabled to restrict access to deployments that are used as a local or remote cluster without any impact to cross-cluster search or cross-cluster replication.

Traffic filtering for remote clusters supports 2 methods:

When setting up traffic filters for a remote connection to an Elastic Cloud Enterprise environment, you also need to upload the region’s TLS certificate of the local cluster to the Elastic Cloud Enterprise environment’s proxy. You can find that region’s TLS certificate in the Security page of any deployment of the environment initiating the remote connection.