Question about Cross Cluster Search and use of AI Assistant between clusters with different licenses

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

We are currently operating two self-managed Elasticsearch clusters:

Cluster 1: With a Basic license.
Cluster 2: With a Commercial Subscription that includes Machine Learning capabilities and access to AI Assistant.
We have several questions about how we could enable some integrations between these clusters, and we would greatly appreciate your guidance and clarifications.

Specific questions:
Cross-cluster search (CCS):
Is it possible to set up CCS between these two clusters, considering that one has a Basic license and the other has a Commercial Subscription?
If possible, are there any relevant limitations when searching from the licensed cluster to the Basic licensed cluster or vice versa?

Using the AI ​​Assistant:
We know that the AI ​​Assistant is available on the subscription cluster. Our questions are:
Would it be possible to use AI Assistant to analyze data residing on Cluster 1 (Basic), for example, pointing directly from the licensed cluster to the Basic as a log source or similar?

Alternatives to integrate data between both clusters:
In case it is not possible to directly connect AI Assistant with data from a Basic cluster, is there any recommendation or pattern suggested by Elastic to integrate this data?
(Example: replicate relevant data from Cluster 1 to Cluster 2, and then apply AI Assistant on that data).

Any guidance on best practices for this type of scenarios (mixed-license clusters, centralized ML, distributed analytics, etc.) would be of great help in defining the way forward.

Thanks in advance.

2

So I'm not your lawyer, I'm not a lawyer at all, and, as with all licensing questions, you need to contact support / your account team to get a definitive answer from your vendor (Elastic).

Any other route (including listening to me) could either mean you're violating a license or you're spending more money than you have to.

How I've seen these go in the past is that my commercial agreement includes a provision indicating that I am licensing a "project" for which I plan to leverage Elasticsearch and that I cannot license parts of a "project" with a different license than other parts of the "project".

By linking my clusters with CCS, it's pretty hard to argue these clusters aren't related to the same "project". So if I was linking my clusters with CCS, I would expect to have to license my clusters at the same level (either basic, gold, platinum, or enterprise).

But your commercial agreement may be different and may use different language, so you will definitely want to contact Elastic support or your account representative for an answer.