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jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
Tsarp · 4 days ago
Im using LanceDB (and pretty happy with it so far). I am looking at the chroma docs and have a few questions

1. I see the core is OSS, any chance of it being pushed up on crates.io(i see you already have a placeholder)

2. Is it embeddable or only as a Axum server?

Do you see all providers converging on similar alpha i.e cheap object storage, nvme drives,ssd cache to solve this?

Cheers and congrats on the launch

jeffchuber · 4 days ago
Hey there

Chroma is fully OSS - embedded, single-node and distributed (data and control plane). afaik lance distributed is not OSS.

We do have plans to release the crate (enabling embedded chroma in rust) - but haven't gotten around to it yet. Hopefully soon!

> Do you see all providers converging on similar alpha i.e cheap object storage, nvme drives,ssd cache to solve this?

It's not only a new pattern in search workloads, but it's happening in streaming, KV, OLTP, OLAP, etc. Yea - it's the future.

jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
BrandiATMuhkuh · 5 days ago
Chroma looks cool. Congratulations on the Cloud version.

For my client I've "built" a similar setup with Supabase + pgVector and I give the AI direct SQL access.

Here is the hard part: Just last week did I index 1.2 million documents for one project of one customer. They have pdfs with 1600 pages or PPTX files of >4GB. Plus lots of 3D/2D architecture drawings in proprietary formats.

The difficulty I see is - getting the data in ETL. This takes days and is fragile - keep RBAC - Supabase/pgVector needs lots of resources when adding new rows to the index -> wish the resources scale up/down automatically. Instead of having to monitor and switch to the next plan.

How could chroma help me here?

jeffchuber · 5 days ago
> Supabase/pgVector needs lots of resources when adding new rows to the index -> wish the resources scale up/down automatically. Instead of having to monitor and switch to the next plan.

Many ways potentially - but one way is Chroma makes all this pain go away.

We're also working on some ingestion tooling that will make it so you don't have to scale, manage or run those pipelines.

jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
taikon · 5 days ago
I still remember when the website said Chroma Cloud was coming end of 2023. What took so long?
jeffchuber · 5 days ago
very fair!

cloud has been in private beta for a year now.

we chose to not release it to the public until we were extremely confident in the system and its characteristics.

databases are a serious business. developers trust us with their mission critical data.

jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
thatwasunusual · 5 days ago
I haven't heard of Chroma before (sorry about that), but how does it compare to Weaviate?
jeffchuber · 5 days ago
no worries!

Chroma and Weaviate are both popular OSS projects, 21k and 14k stars respectively.

Weaviate has some features that Chroma does not (yet) - notably vector quantization. Weaviate is a single-node DB that can be run in cluster mode.

Chroma focuses on reliability and operational simplicity. The fully distributed architecture means there are no knobs to tune or config to set.

There's no right tool for everyone. Try both!

jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
didip · 5 days ago
What about comparison with Qdrant?
jeffchuber · 5 days ago
Qdrant team is also smart!

The main reason we have seen people switch from Qdrant to Chroma is for operational simplicity and reliability. With Qdrant you have to size nodes, manage sharding, be oncall, etc - with Chroma there is literally 0 config or operational pain. Search, that just works!

jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
srameshc · 5 days ago
I appreciate the straightforward pricing calculator and the pricing seems very reasonable.
jeffchuber · 5 days ago
thank you!
jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
tbird24 · 5 days ago
I run a fractional jobs site. Lots of non-technical customers are interested in ai. What problem does Chroma solve for these non-technical users?
jeffchuber · 5 days ago
your customers might have heard of RAG (retrieval augmented generation) before. chroma powers the “R” in RAG. It enables language models to dynamically pull in information to help them answer questions and solve tasks.
jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
acohn24 · 5 days ago
we want to create vector search for people — what's the best way to use Chroma Cloud for that?
jeffchuber · 5 days ago
can you tell me more about your use case?
jeffchuber commented on Show HN: Chroma Cloud – serverless search database for AI   trychroma.com/cloud... · Posted by u/jeffchuber
codekisser · 5 days ago
what place do vector-native databases have in 2025? I feel using pgvector or redisearch works well and most setups will probably be using postgres or redis anyway.
jeffchuber · 5 days ago
if you want or need to optimize for speed, cost, scalability or accuracy.

dedicated solutions have more advanced search features enable more accurate results. search indexing is resource intensive and can contend for resources with postgres/redis. the cost and speed benefits are naturally more pronounced as data volume scales.

for example - chroma has built in regex+trigram search and copy-on-write forking of indexes. this feature combo is killer for the code-search use case.

u/jeffchuber

KarmaCake day474December 10, 2010
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