Building with Weaviate: Getting to Production

Introduction

Are you ready to deploy and test Weaviate on a self-managed K8s (Kubernetes) cluster? This guide shows how to validate Weaviate’s capabilities in your enterprise environment.

At the end of this guide, expect to have:

• A configured Helm-based deployment and networking setup
• Basic scaling, persistent storage, and resource management
• TLS, RBAC, and security best practices implements
• Monitoring, logging, and backup strategies enabled

Prerequisites

Before beginning, ensure that you have the following:

Technical Knowledge

• Basic Kubernetes and containerization conceptual knowledge
• Basic experience with Helm and kubectl

note

Check out the Academy course “Run Weaviate on Kubernetes” if you need assistance.

Required Tools

• A running Kubernetes cluster with Weaviate installed
• kubectl installed
• Helm installed

Step 1: Configure your Helm Chart

• Use the official Weaviate Helm chart for your installation:

  helm repo add weaviate https://weaviate.github.io/weaviate-helm
  helm install my-weaviate weaviate/weaviate

• Customize the values to fit your enterprise requirements (e.g., resource allocation, storage settings).
• Deploy the chart and verify pod health.

Step 2: Network Security

• Configure an ingress controller to securely expose Weaviate.
• Enable TLS with a certificate manager and enforce TLS encryption for all client-server communication.
• Assign a domain name for external access.
• Implement RBAC or admin lists to restrict user access.

An example of RBAC enabled on your Helm chart

  authorization:
  rbac:
    enabled: true
     root_users:
    - admin_user1
    - admin_user2

An example of admin lists implemented on your Helm chart (if not using RBAC)

  admin_list:
    enabled: true
    users:
    - admin_user1
    - admin_user2
    - api-key-user-admin
    read_only_users:
    - readonly_user1
    - readonly_user2
    - api-key-user-readOnly

Admin List Configuration

tip

Using an admin list will allow you to define your admin or read-only user/API-key pairs across all Weaviate resources. Whereas RBAC allows you more granular permissions by defining roles and assigning them to users either via API keys or OIDC.

Step 3: Scaling

• Implement horizontal scaling to ensure high availability:

replicaCount: 3

• Define CPU/memory limits and requests to optimize pod efficiency.

An example of defining CPU and memory limits and cores

resources:
  requests:
    cpu: "500m"
    memory: "1Gi"
  limits:
    cpu: "2"
    memory: "4Gi"

Step 4: Monitoring and Logging

• Use Prometheus and Grafana to collect and analyze performance metrics.
• Implement alerting for issue resolution.

An example of enabling service monitoring

serviceMonitor:
  enabled: true
  interval: 30s
  scrapeTimeout: 10s

Step 5: Upgrades and Backups

• Use the rolling update strategy used by Helm to minimize downtime.

An example of configuring the rolling update strategy.

updateStrategy:
  type: RollingUpdate
  rollingUpdate:
    maxSurge: 1
    maxUnavailable: 0

• Test new Weaviate versions before deploying into production.
• Implement disaster recovery procedures to ensure that data is restored quickly.

Conclusion

Voila! You now have a deployment that is somewhat ready for production. Your next step will be to complete the self-assessment and identify any gaps.

Next Steps: Production Readiness Self-Assessment

Questions and feedback

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

Technical questions

If you have questions feel free to post on our Community forum.

Documentation feedback

Leave feedback by opening a GitHub issue.