gcp-starter environment

Overview

This document describes concepts related to the gcp-starter environment. To learn about indexes and other environments, see Understanding.

The gcp-starter region is a unique Starter Plan region

Users on the Starter Plan can choose to deploy their project on one of multiple environments. One option is the gcp-starter region.

Unlike other Starter Plan regions, the gcp starter region has unique features and limitations.

Features

Like other Starter Plan environments, projects on the gcp-starter environment support one pod with enough resources to support approximately 100,000 vectors. Indexes on the gcp-starter environment do not specify pod types; create_index calls ignore the pod_type parameter.

Unlike other Starter Plan environments, projects in the gcp-starter region have no retention limits; data is retained indefinitely. Indexes in these projects are not deleted after inactivity as in other environments.

After upgrading from the Starter Plan, you keep your free gcp-starter project: you are not charged for use on this project. To use your data on a Standard or Enterprise environment, insert the data to a new project in a supported environment.

Limitations

Like other Starter Plan environments, projects in the gcp-starter environment do not support replicas.

After upserting records to indexes in gcp-starter, the query and describe_index_stats operations may not return updated records for up to 10 seconds.

The gcp-starter environment does not support the following features:

• Collections
• Delete by metadata
• configure_index(). Because this environment only supports one index configuration, this operation is not supported.
• describe_index() with metadata filtering
• metadata_config parameter to create_index().

Developing on gcp-starter

Because projects on the gcp-starter region do not support the above features, you may need to use different features when developing your project.

Namespaces

Indexes in gcp-starter are limited to 100 namespaces. If you need more than 100 namespaces, you may wish to use metadata filtering to support multitenancy in your project. Another alternative is to upgrade to the Standard or Enterprise plans and use index types that support more namespaces.

Collections

Projects in the gcp-starter environment do not support the collections feature. However, collections may not be necessary or appropriate for projects in the gcp-starter environment. Collections serve two primary purposes: decreasing usage by archiving inactive indexes, and experimenting with different index configurations. However, projects on the gcp-starter environment neither incur usage costs nor specify pod types or sizes.

Delete by metadata

Projects in the gcp-starter environment do not support deleting records by metadata. In some cases, you may be able to delete records by ID instead. This may require you to first query your index with metadata filters, then extract the record IDs.