Elasticsearch's new cold tier of searchable snapshots, now generally available in version 7.11, offers a significant reduction in storage costs—up to 50% compared to the warm tier—while maintaining the reliability and redundancy of the hot and warm tiers. This tier achieves cost savings by keeping only the primary shards on local storage and relying on snapshots stored in cloud object stores for resiliency. The team conducted thorough validation tests, including full-cluster restarts, rolling restarts, and node crash scenarios, to ensure the cold tier operates efficiently and reliably at scale. These tests demonstrated the effectiveness of the persistent cache introduced in Elasticsearch 7.11, which minimized network traffic and expedited the process of returning the cluster to a healthy state. Users can begin using the cold tier by upgrading to Elasticsearch 7.11 or starting a new cluster on Elastic Cloud, with detailed guidance available in the official documentation.