Understanding projects

Overview

This document explains the concepts related to Pinecone projects.

Projects contain indexes and users

Each Pinecone project contains a number of indexes and users. Only a user who belongs to the project can access the indexes in that project. Each project also has at least one project owner. All of the pods in a single project are located in a single environment.

Project settings

When you create a new project, you can choose the name, deployment environment, and pod limit.

Project environment

When creating a project, you must choose a cloud environment for the indexes in that project. Your project environment can affect your pricing. The following table lists the available cloud regions, the corresponding values of the environment parameter for the init() operation, and which billing tier has access to each environment:

Cloud	Region	Environment	Tier Availability
GCP	us-central-1 (Iowa)	gcp-starter	Starter
GCP	us-west-1 (N. California)	us-west1-gcp-free	Starter
GCP	asia-southeast-1 (Singapore)	asia-southeast1-gcp-free	Starter
GCP	us-west-4 (Las Vegas)	us-west4-gcp-free	Starter
GCP	us-west-1 (N. California)	us-west1-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	us-central-1 (Iowa)	us-central1-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	us-west-4 (Las Vegas)	us-west4-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	us-east-4 (Virginia)	us-east4-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	northamerica-northeast-1	northamerica-northeast1-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	asia-northeast-1 (Japan)	asia-northeast1-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	asia-southeast-1 (Singapore)	asia-southeast1-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	us-east-1 (South Carolina)	us-east1-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	eu-west-1 (Belgium)	eu-west1-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
GCP	eu-west-4 (Netherlands)	eu-west4-gcp	Standard / Enterprise
AWS	us-east-1 (Virginia)	us-east-1-aws	Standard / Enterprise
Azure	eastus (Virginia)	eastus-azure	Standard / Enterprise

* This environment has unique features and limitations. See gcp-starter environment for more information.

Contact us if you need a dedicated deployment in other regions.

The environment cannot be changed after the project is created.

Project pod limit

You can set the maximum number of pods that can be used in total across all indexes in a project. Use this to control costs.

The pod limit can be changed only by the project owner.

Project roles

There are two project roles: Project owner and project member. Table 1 below summarizes the permissions for each role.

Table 1: Project roles and permissions

Project role	Permissions in organization
Project owner	Manage project members
Manage project API keys
Manage pod limits
Project member	Access API keys
Create indexes in project
Use indexes in project

API keys

Each Pinecone project has one or more API keys. In order to make calls to the Pinecone API, a user must provide a valid API key for the relevant Pinecone project.

To view the API key for your project, open the Pinecone console, select the project, and click API Keys.

Project ID

Each Pinecone project has a project ID. This hexadecimal string appears as part of the URL for API calls.

To find a project’s ID, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Pinecone console.
2. In the upper-left corner, select your project.
3. Click Indexes.
4. Under the name of your indexes, find the index URL. For example:
   example-index-1e3g52e.svc.us-east1-gcp.pinecone.io

The portion of the index URL after the index name and before the dot is the project ID.

For example, in the index URL test-index-3e2f43f.svc.us-east1-gcp.pinecone.io, the project ID is 3e2f43f.