Hi @QwerFact
Good questions and yes it is a bit confusing...
And looks like you basically have it correct.
In short, Searchable Snapshots is the Enterprise Licenses Feature...
There are 2 types:
-
Fully mounted which is can be used with Cold: Fully Mounted (which pretty much acts like a normal index, but if a shard is corrupted or lost it is automatically remediated)
-
Partially Mounted which is used with Frozen: The index is partially mounted and the vast majority of the data resides in S3 with some very effective caching so searches still perform reasonably well.
And yes you are correct Cold without a searchable snapshot is just a normal index with no replicas and all the assumptions that go with that... If a shard gets lost your corrupted you will need to intervene to remediate it. This is available in Basic Subscription.
There is even more historical confusion as we used to have a frozen index feature that has long been deprecated and has nothing to do with searchable snapshots, I explained those here... for anyone that runs across this post.