This page describes the Pinecone architecture for pod-based indexes.

Basic architecture

The Pinecone vector database is a cloud-based service deployed partly on Kubernetes. For pod-based architecture, Pinecone serves control plane requests from an API gateway and routes these requests to user indexes; clients make data plane requests directly to pods. See Fig. 1 below.

Figure 1: Pinecone pod-based architecture diagram

Pinecone architecture diagram

Components

  • Pods. Each index has one or more replicas, each of which is deployed to a pod with assigned SSD and memory capacity. The CPU assigned to the pod performs computation; the SSD stores metadata.
  • A stream processor indexes vectors.
  • The blob store contains persistent snapshots of replica data.

For more information about security and encryption, see Security.