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AWS Deployment

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A Simple AWS Deployment

You can deploy Chroma on a long-running server, and connect to it remotely. There are many possible configurations, but for convenience we have provided a very simple AWS CloudFormation template to experiment with deploying Chroma to EC2 on AWS.
Chroma and its underlying database need at least 2GB of RAM, which means it won’t fit on the 1gb instances provided as part of the AWS Free Tier. This template uses a t3.small EC2 instance, which costs about two cents an hour, or $15 for a full month, and gives you 2GiB of memory. If you follow these instructions, AWS will bill you accordingly.
By default, this template saves all data on a single volume. When you delete or replace it, the data will disappear. For serious production use (with high availability, backups, etc.) please read and understand the CloudFormation template and use it as a basis for what you need, or reach out to the Chroma team for assistance.

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Step 1: Get an AWS Account

You will need an AWS Account. You can use one you already have, or create a new one.

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Step 2: Get credentials

For this example, we will be using the AWS command line interface. There are several ways to configure the AWS CLI, but for the purposes of these examples we will presume that you have obtained an AWS access key and will be using environment variables to configure AWS. Export the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables in your shell: 
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=**\*\***\*\*\*\***\*\***
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=****\*\*****\*\*****\*\*****
You can also configure AWS to use a region of your choice using the AWS_REGION environment variable: 
export AWS_REGION=us-east-1

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Step 3: Run CloudFormation

Chroma publishes a CloudFormation template to S3 for each release. To launch the template using AWS CloudFormation, run the following command line invocation. Replace --stack-name my-chroma-stack with a different stack name, if you wish. 
aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name my-chroma-stack --template-url https://s3.amazonaws.com/public.trychroma.com/cloudformation/latest/chroma.cf.json
Wait a few minutes for the server to boot up, and Chroma will be available! You can get the public IP address of your new Chroma server using the AWS console, or using the following command: 
aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name my-chroma-stack --query 'Stacks[0].Outputs'
Note that even after the IP address of your instance is available, it may still take a few minutes for Chroma to be up and running.

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Customize the Stack (optional)

The CloudFormation template allows you to pass particular key/value pairs to override aspects of the stack. Available keys are:
  • InstanceType - the AWS instance type to run (default: t3.small)
  • KeyName - the AWS EC2 KeyPair to use, allowing to access the instance via SSH (default: none)
To set a CloudFormation stack’s parameters using the AWS CLI, use the --parameters command line option. Parameters must be specified using the format ParameterName={parameter},ParameterValue={value}. For example, the following command launches a new stack similar to the above, but on a m5.4xlarge EC2 instance, and adding a KeyPair named mykey so anyone with the associated private key can SSH into the machine: 
aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name my-chroma-stack --template-url https://s3.amazonaws.com/public.trychroma.com/cloudformation/latest/chroma.cf.json \
 --parameters ParameterKey=KeyName,ParameterValue=mykey \
 ParameterKey=InstanceType,ParameterValue=m5.4xlarge

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Step 4: Chroma Client Set-Up

Once your EC2 instance is up and running with Chroma, all you need to do is configure your HttpClient to use the server’s IP address and port 8000. Since you are running a Chroma server on AWS, our thin-client package may be enough for your application.
import chromadb

chroma_client = chromadb.HttpClient(
    host="<Your Chroma instance IP>",
    port=8000
)
chroma_client.heartbeat()

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Step 5: Clean Up (optional).

To destroy the stack and remove all AWS resources, use the AWS CLI delete-stack command.
This will destroy all the data in your Chroma database, unless you’ve taken a snapshot or otherwise backed it up.
aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name my-chroma-stack

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Observability with AWS

Chroma is instrumented with OpenTelemetry hooks for observability. We currently only exports OpenTelemetry traces. These should allow you to understand how requests flow through the system and quickly identify bottlenecks. Check out the observability docs for a full explanation of the available parameters. To enable tracing on your Chroma server, simply pass your desired values as arguments when creating your Cloudformation stack: 
aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name my-chroma-stack --template-url https://s3.amazonaws.com/public.trychroma.com/cloudformation/latest/chroma.cf.json \
 --parameters ParameterKey=ChromaOtelCollectionEndpoint,ParameterValue="api.honeycomb.com" \
 ParameterKey=ChromaOtelServiceName,ParameterValue="chromadb" \
 ParameterKey=ChromaOtelCollectionHeaders,ParameterValue="{'x-honeycomb-team': 'abc'}"

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Troubleshooting

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Error: No default VPC for this user

If you get an error saying No default VPC for this user when creating ChromaInstanceSecurityGroup, head to AWS VPC section and create a default VPC for your user.