qdrant-deployment-options
Guides Qdrant deployment selection. Use when someone asks 'how to deploy Qdrant', 'Docker vs Cloud', 'local mode', 'embedded Qdrant', 'Qdrant EDGE', 'which deployment option', 'self-hosted vs cloud', or 'need lowest latency deployment'. Also use when choosing between deployment types for a new project.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/qdrant/skills /tmp/qdrant-deployment-options && cp -r /tmp/qdrant-deployment-options/skills/qdrant-deployment-options ~/.claude/skills/qdrant-deployment-optionsSKILL.md
# Which Qdrant Deployment Do I Need? Start with what you need: managed ops or full control? Network latency acceptable or not? Production or prototyping? The answer narrows to one of four options. ## Getting Started or Prototyping Use when: building a prototype, running tests, CI/CD pipelines, or learning Qdrant. - Use local mode (Python only): zero-dependency, in-memory or disk-persisted, no server needed [Local mode](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/quickstart/) - Local mode data format is NOT compatible with server. Do not use for production or benchmarking. - For a real server locally, use Docker [Quick start](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/quickstart/?s=download-and-run) ## Going to Production (Self-Hosted) Use when: you need full control over infrastructure, data residency, or custom configuration. - Docker is the default deployment. Full Qdrant Open Source feature set, minimal setup. [Quick start](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/quickstart/?s=download-and-run) - You own operations: upgrades, backups, scaling, monitoring - Must set up distributed mode manually for multi-node clusters [Distributed deployment](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/distributed_deployment/) - Consider Hybrid Cloud if you want Qdrant Cloud management on your infrastructure [Hybrid Cloud](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/hybrid-cloud/) ## Going to Production (Zero-Ops) Use when: you want managed infrastructure with zero-downtime updates, automatic backups, and resharding without operating clusters yourself. - Qdrant Cloud handles upgrades, scaling, backups, and monitoring [Qdrant Cloud](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/cloud-quickstart/) - Supports multi-version upgrades automatically - Provides features not available in self-hosted: `/sys_metrics`, managed resharding, pre-configured alerts ## Need Lowest Possible Latency Use when: network round-trip to a server is unacceptable. Edge devices, in-process search, or latency-critical applications. - Qdrant EDGE: in-process bindings to Qdrant shard-level functions, no network overhead [Qdrant EDGE](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/edge/edge-quickstart/) - Same data format as server. Can sync with server via shard snapshots. - Single-node feature set only. No distributed mode. ## What NOT to Do - Use local mode for production or benchmarking (not optimized, incompatible data format) - Self-host without monitoring and backup strategy (you will lose data or miss outages) - Choose EDGE when you need distributed search (single-node only) - Pick Hybrid Cloud unless you have data residency requirements (unnecessary Kubernetes complexity when Qdrant Cloud works)
Qdrant provides client SDKs for various programming languages, allowing easy integration with Qdrant deployments.
Guides embedding model migration in Qdrant without downtime. Use when someone asks 'how to switch embedding models', 'how to migrate vectors', 'how to update to a new model', 'zero-downtime model change', 'how to re-embed my data', or 'can I use two models at once'. Also use when upgrading model dimensions, switching providers, or A/B testing models.
Guides Qdrant monitoring and observability setup. Use when someone asks 'how to monitor Qdrant', 'what metrics to track', 'is Qdrant healthy', 'optimizer stuck', 'why is memory growing', 'requests are slow', or needs to set up Prometheus, Grafana, or health checks. Also use when debugging production issues that require metric analysis.
Diagnoses Qdrant production issues using metrics and observability tools. Use when someone reports 'optimizer stuck', 'indexing too slow', 'memory too high', 'OOM crash', 'queries are slow', 'latency spike', or 'search was fast now it's slow'. Also use when performance degrades without obvious config changes.
Guides Qdrant monitoring setup including Prometheus scraping, health probes, Hybrid Cloud metrics, alerting, and log centralization. Use when someone asks 'how to set up monitoring', 'Prometheus config', 'Grafana dashboard', 'health check endpoints', 'how to scrape Hybrid Cloud', 'what alerts to set', 'how to centralize logs', or 'audit logging'.
Different techniques to optimize the performance of Qdrant, including indexing strategies, query optimization, and hardware considerations. Use when you want to improve the speed and efficiency of your Qdrant deployment.
Diagnoses and fixes slow Qdrant indexing and data ingestion. Use when someone reports 'uploads are slow', 'indexing takes forever', 'optimizer is stuck', 'HNSW build time too long', or 'data uploaded but search is bad'. Also use when optimizer status shows errors, segments won't merge, or indexing threshold questions arise.
Diagnoses and reduces Qdrant memory usage. Use when someone reports 'memory too high', 'RAM keeps growing', 'node crashed', 'out of memory', 'memory leak', or asks 'why is memory usage so high?', 'how to reduce RAM?'. Also use when memory doesn't match calculations, quantization didn't help, or nodes crash during recovery.