Working with Serverless Indexes¶

Serverless indexes scale automatically — you pay for storage and queries without managing infrastructure. Pinecone handles capacity, replication, and availability.

Create a serverless index¶

Pass a ServerlessSpec with a cloud provider and region:

from pinecone import Pinecone, ServerlessSpec

pc = Pinecone(api_key="your-api-key")

pc.indexes.create(
    name="product-search",
    dimension=1536,
    metric="cosine",
    spec=ServerlessSpec(cloud="aws", region="us-east-1"),
)

create polls until the index is ready by default. Pass timeout=-1 to return immediately without waiting.

Supported clouds and regions¶

Use the CloudProvider, AwsRegion, GcpRegion, and AzureRegion enums for tab-completion and typo safety:

from pinecone import Pinecone, ServerlessSpec
from pinecone.models.enums import AwsRegion, CloudProvider

pc = Pinecone(api_key="your-api-key")

pc.indexes.create(
    name="product-search",
    dimension=1536,
    metric="cosine",
    spec=ServerlessSpec(
        cloud=CloudProvider.AWS,
        region=AwsRegion.US_EAST_1,
    ),
)

AWS: us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1

GCP: us-central1, europe-west4

Azure: eastus2

Enable deletion protection¶

Add deletion_protection="enabled" to prevent accidental deletes:

from pinecone import Pinecone, ServerlessSpec
from pinecone.models.enums import DeletionProtection

pc = Pinecone(api_key="your-api-key")

pc.indexes.create(
    name="product-search",
    dimension=1536,
    metric="cosine",
    spec=ServerlessSpec(cloud="aws", region="us-east-1"),
    deletion_protection=DeletionProtection.ENABLED,
)

Check index status¶

describe returns an IndexModel with the current state:

desc = pc.indexes.describe("product-search")
print(desc.status.state)   # e.g. "Ready"
print(desc.status.ready)   # True when ready to accept requests

Poll manually when you passed timeout=-1 to create:

import time

while not pc.indexes.describe("product-search").status.ready:
    time.sleep(5)

List indexes¶

list returns an IndexList you can iterate, slice, or call .names() on:

for idx in pc.indexes.list():
    print(idx.name, idx.status.state)

# Just the names
print(pc.indexes.list().names())

Describe an index¶

idx = pc.indexes.describe("product-search")
print(idx.name)
print(idx.dimension)
print(idx.metric)
print(idx.spec.serverless.cloud)
print(idx.spec.serverless.region)

Delete an index¶

pc.indexes.delete("product-search")

delete polls until the index is gone. Pass timeout=-1 to return immediately.

If deletion protection is enabled, disable it first:

pc.indexes.configure("product-search", deletion_protection="disabled")
pc.indexes.delete("product-search")