Last November, we quietly introduced the private beta of the Weaviate Cloud Service, a fully managed vector database as a service. Today we are announcing a big upgrade to the Weaviate Cloud and availability of the public beta release of the service.
The Weaviate Cloud enables AI application developers to use the open source Weaviate vector database as a fully managed cloud service. It’s the easiest way to get a vector database cluster up and running within minutes, so you can get right to loading, vectorizing, and searching your data.
Thanks for all the early feedback!
During the Weaviate Cloud private beta, we had several thousand people create free Weaviate Cloud sandboxes and try it out. We’d like to thank everyone who tried it and gave us feedback; it was extremely helpful. We look forward to hearing about your experience with the new (and future versions), which you can still try for free here.
The Weaviate Cloud Service Public Beta
Here’s a quick overview of what’s new and what’s coming next.
Help yourself - Self-Service Provisioning Improvements
One of the biggest changes from the private beta to today’s public beta release is automated Weviate database cluster provisioning. Immediately after signing up for a Weaviate Cloud account, you can begin creating, querying, securing, and controlling one or more databases via the Weaviate Cloud console. As a result of the automation improvements, newly created Weaviate database clusters will be ready for use within a minute or two.
Weaviate Cloud Service runs on Google Cloud (other clouds & on-premises are options too)
The Weaviate Cloud Service runs on Google Cloud, and by default, new Weaviate database clusters are provisioned to run on Google Cloud. When you create a new cluster, you can choose a specific Google Cloud location (region) on which to run your database cluster. We do plan to make Weaviate Cloud available on AWS and Azure; stay tuned for news on that!
Hybrid SaaS Option - Fully Managed, on Your Cloud
If you’d like your database hosted on a dedicated private cloud, you can contact us and request a Hybrid-SaaS cluster. With the Hybrid-SaaS option, Weaviate will set up and manage your database cluster on a dedicated private cloud system on the cloud platform of your choice or on premises in your data center.
The Full Power of the Weaviate Vector Database
The Weaviate Cloud is always updated with the latest Weaviate open source database version and functionality. If you’ve been using Weaviate Cloud since its release, you’ve seen it enhanced with new core Weaviate database functionality, such as:
- ChatGPT plug-in
- Bitmap indexing for faster filtered search
- HNSW-PQ index and data compression for greater cost efficiency
- Database replication
- WAND and BM25 search
- Cursor API for processing query results
Develop More Productively - Interactive Admin & Query Console
We care a lot about the Weaviate user experience, so developer productivity is a top design priority. Hence, we implemented many new features in the Weaviate Cloud Console, which now allows you to administer your Weaviate clusters - create, delete, restore, monitor your clusters and activate high-availability settings.
The console also features a GraphQL IDE that allows you to interactively query your Weaviate databases. The GraphQL query editor features:
- Syntax highlighting
- Intelligent type ahead of fields, arguments, types, and more
- Real-time error highlighting and reporting for queries and variables
- Automatic query and variables completion
Control Access to Weaviate - API Key Management
To help make it easy to control access to your vector databases, all Weaviate Cloud instances can generate API keys with full admin (read and write) access. Read-only API keys are also supported for paid clusters.
Next Stop, GA…
The Weaviate Cloud is in public beta. General Availability is planned for release later in 2023, after we’ve addressed feedback from public beta users.
If you’d like to try Weaviate Cloud, you can create a free Weaviate Cloud Sandbox here.
And if you have questions or feedback, please join the Weaviate community on Slack. We look forward to hearing from you!
Ready to start building?
Check out the Quickstart tutorial, or build amazing apps with a free trial of Weaviate Cloud (WCD).
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