This page provides recommendations and best practices for preparing your Pinecone indexes for production, anticipating production issues, and enabling reliability and growth.
For high-scale use cases, consider using the Pinecone AWS Reference Architecture as a starting point, and read up on code best practices.

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Prepare your project structure

One of the first steps towards building a production-ready Pinecone index is configuring your project correctly.
  • Consider creating a separate project for your development and production indexes, to allow for testing changes to your index before deploying them to production.
  • Ensure that you have properly configured user access to the Pinecone console, so that only those users who need to access the production index can do so.
  • Ensure that you have properly configured access through the API by managing API keys and using API key permissions.
Consider how best to manage the API keys associated with your production project. In order to make calls to the Pinecone API, you must provide a valid API key for the relevant Pinecone project.

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Test your query results

Before you move your index to production, make sure that your index is returning accurate results in the context of your application by identifying the appropriate metrics for evaluating your results.

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Target indexes by host

Before moving your project to production, make sure that you are targeting indexes by host rather than by name.

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Backup up your indexes

In order to enable long-term retention, compliance archiving, and deployment of new indexes, consider backing up your production indexes by creating a backup or collection.

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Enforce security

Use Pinecone’s security features to protect your production data:
  • Data security
    • Private endpoints
    • Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)
  • Authorization
    • API keys
    • Role-based access control (RBAC)
    • Organization single sign-on (SSO)
  • Audit logs
  • Bring your own cloud

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Tune for performance

Before serving production workloads, identify ways to increase search relevance, increase throughput, and decrease latency.

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Configure monitoring

Prepare to monitor the production performance and availability of your indexes.

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Configure CI/CD

Use Pinecone in CI/CD to safely test changes before deploying them to production.

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Know how to get support

If you need help, contact Support, or talk to the Pinecone community. Ensure that your plan tier matches the support and availability SLAs you need. This may require you to upgrade to Enterprise.