# Production Environments

Deploying Weaviate in a production environment requires careful planning to ensure stability, security, and performance.
Currently, the only supported method of deploying Weaviate in a production environment is through Kubernetes.
Unlike development or testing environments, a production instance must be resilient, scalable, and optimized for real-world workloads.

## Key Aspects of a Production Environments

- **Scalability and Performance**
  - Production workloads demand high availability and low latency.
  - Auto-scaling strategies and resource monitoring must be in place.
- **Data Resilience and Backups**
  - Data must be safeguarded against corruption and loss.
  - Disaster recover strategies and automated backups must be implemented.
- **Security and Compliance**
  - Data at rest and in transit should be encrypted.
  - Compliance best practices must be followed.
- **Monitoring and Observability**
  - Logs and metrics must be collected for troubleshooting and optimization.
  - Monitoring tools should be used to track performance.
  - Alerting mechanisms must be set up to detect any anaomolies or failures.
- **Networking and Access Control**
  - Privileges should be limited using RBAC (role-based access control).
  - Load balancing should be configured.

### Weaviate Production Environments

Weaviate has different options for deploying in a production environment using:

- **Shared Cloud**: A Shared Cloud instance is a robust cluster designed for production use.
- **Dedicated Cloud**: Dedicated Cloud is a fully-managed deployment of dedicated resources within a secure, highly available environment.

## Questions and feedback

Have a question or feedback? Here's how to reach us.

::::card-grid
:::card{title="Community Forum" href="https://forum.weaviate.io/c/support" icon="messages-square"}
Ask questions and connect with other developers on our **Community forum**.
:::

:::card{title="Support" href="/guides/support-overview" icon="life-buoy"}
Weaviate Cloud user or customer? Find the right channel on the **Support page**.
:::
::::

## Related pages

- [Agents](./agents-index.md)
- [AI-assisted Weaviate code generation](./ai-assisted-vibe-coding-index.md)
- [APIs](./apis-index.md)
- [Authorization and authentication](./authorization-and-authentication-index.md)
- [Benchmarks](./benchmarks-index.md)
- [Best practices](./best-practices-index.md)
- [Client libraries](./clients-index.md)
- [Client Libraries / SDKs](./client-libraries-index.md)
- [Cloud](./cloud-index.md)
- [Cloud account management](./cloud-account-management-index.md)

# Agent Instructions

This portal answers questions programmatically. To receive a synthesized,
source-cited answer instead of crawling page by page, append the `?ask=`
query parameter to any page URL on this site:

    /guides/quickstart?ask=how+do+I+authenticate

Optional parameters:

- `&goal=<what-you-are-trying-to-do>` steers the answer toward your
  objective (e.g. `&goal=write+a+python+client`).
- `&version=<label>` scopes the answer to a mounted version when the
  portal publishes more than one.

The response is `text/markdown`: the answer followed by a `# Sources` list
of the portal pages it was grounded in. Status codes are the contract:

- `200` — the answer; `402` — the portal owner’s plan or answer credits are
  exhausted (surface this to your operator; do NOT retry); `429` — you are
  rate-limited; back off for the `Retry-After` seconds; `503` — the answer
  lane is temporarily unavailable; fall back to crawling the `.md` pages.

For the full corpus map read `llms.txt` at the site root; for the tool
surface (search + page fetch as MCP tools) see `/mcp`.