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Azure Deployment

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A Simple Azure Deployment

You can deploy Chroma on a long-running server, and connect to it remotely. For convenience, we have provided a very simple Terraform configuration to experiment with deploying Chroma to Azure.
Chroma and its underlying database need at least 2GB of RAM. When defining your VM size for the template in this example, make sure it meets this requirement.
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 Terraform 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: Install Terraform

Download Terraform and follow the installation instructions for you OS.

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Step 2: Authenticate with Azure

az login

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Step 3: Configure your Azure Settings

Create a chroma.tfvars file. Use it to define the following variables for your Azure Resource Group name, VM size, and location. Note that this template creates a new resource group for your Chroma deployment. 
resource_group_name = "your-azure-resource-group-name"
location            = "your-location"
machine_type        = "Standard_B1s"

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Step 4: Initialize and deploy with Terraform

Download our Azure Terraform configuration to the same directory as your chroma.tfvars file. Then run the following commands to deploy your Chroma stack. Initialize Terraform: 
terraform init
Plan the deployment, and review it to ensure it matches your expectations: 
terraform plan -var-file chroma.tfvars
Finally, apply the deployment: 
terraform apply -var-file chroma.tfvars
After a few minutes, you can get the IP address of your instance with 
terraform output -raw public_ip_address

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Step 5: Chroma Client Set-Up

Once your Azure VM 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 Azure, 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 Azure resources, use the terraform destroy command. 
terraform destroy -var-file chroma.tfvars
This will destroy all the data in your Chroma database, unless you’ve taken a snapshot or otherwise backed it up.

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Observability with Azure

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 define the following variables in your chroma.tfvars: 
chroma_otel_collection_endpoint          = "api.honeycomb.com"
chroma_otel_service_name                 = "chromadb"
chroma_otel_collection_headers           = "{'x-honeycomb-team': 'abc'}"