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Tenant Offloading

Tenants can be offloaded to cold storage to reduce memory and disk usage, and onloaded back when needed.

This page explains how to configure tenant offloading in Weaviate. For information on how to offload and onload tenants, see How-to: manage tenant states.

Tenant offload modules​

Offloading: AWS S3 only

As of Weaviate v1.26.0, tenants can only be offloaded to cold storage in AWS S3. Additional storage options may be added in future releases.

To offload a tenant, use the offload-s3 module.

To use tenant offloading in Weaviate, you need enable a relevant offloading module.

offload-s3 module​

The offload-s3 module enables you to offload or onload tenants to/from an S3 bucket.

To use the offload-s3 module, add offload-s3 to the ENABLE_MODULES in your docker-compose file as shown below.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      ENABLE_MODULES: 'offload-s3' # plus other modules you may need
      OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET: 'weaviate-offload' # the name of the S3 bucket
      OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET_AUTO_CREATE: 'true' # create the bucket if it does not exist

If the target S3 bucket does not exist, the OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET_AUTO_CREATE must be set to true so that Weaviate can create the bucket automatically.

For kubernetes users, enable the relevant offload service in the helm chart values file, and set the necessary environment variables:

# Configure offload providers
offload:
  s3:
    enabled: true  # Set this value to true to enable the offload-s3 module
    envconfig:
      OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET: weaviate-offload  # the name of the S3 bucket
      OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET_AUTO_CREATE: true  # create the bucket if it does not exist

Environment variables​

The offload-s3 module reads the following environment variables:

Env VarDescriptionDefault Value
OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKETThe destination S3 bucket to offload tenants.weaviate-offload
OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET_AUTO_CREATEWhen true, Weaviate automatically creates an S3 bucket if it does not exist.false
OFFLOAD_S3_CONCURRENCYThe number of concurrent offload operations.25
OFFLOAD_TIMEOUTThe timeout for offloading operations (create bucket, upload, download).120 (in seconds)
Timeout
  • Offload operations are asynchronous. As a result, the timeout is for the operation to start, not to complete.
  • Each operation will retry up to 10 times on timeouts, except on authentication/authorization errors.

AWS permissions​

Requirements

The Weaviate instance must have the necessary permissions to access the S3 bucket.

  • The provided AWS identity must be able to write to the bucket.
  • If OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET_AUTO_CREATE is set to true, the AWS identity must have permission to create the bucket.

You must provide Weaviate with AWS authentication details. You can choose between access-key or ARN-based authentication:

Option 1: With IAM and ARN roles​

The backup module will first try to authenticate itself using AWS IAM. If the authentication fails then it will try to authenticate with Option 2.

Option 2: With access key and secret access key​

Environment variableDescription
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_IDThe id of the AWS access key for the desired account.
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEYThe secret AWS access key for the desired account.
AWS_REGION(Optional) The AWS Region. If not provided, the module will try to parse AWS_DEFAULT_REGION.

Questions and feedback​

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the user forum.