Chroma on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Chroma is an AI-native open-source vector database purpose-built for embeddings and similarity search. It powers RAG pipelines, semantic search, and LangChain/LlamaIndex workflows. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Chroma on Cloud Run module on Google Cloud: deploy it, access and verify it, run it day-to-day, observe it, diagnose common problems, and tear it down.

The lab focuses on operating the Cloud Run module and the Google Cloud platform, not on Chroma product features. For the complete list of provisioned services and every configuration input (organised by group), see the Configuration Guide — this lab deliberately does not duplicate that detail so it stays accurate over time.

Objectives

By the end of this lab you will be able to:

• Deploy the module from the RAD platform and locate the resources it provisions.
• Access and verify the running service.
• Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and storage.
• Observe the service with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring.
• Diagnose and resolve the most common deployment and runtime issues.
• Tear the deployment down cleanly.

Prerequisites

• Services_GCP deployed in the target project (provides the VPC, Artifact Registry, and shared service accounts this module depends on).
• A Google Cloud project with billing enabled.
• gcloud CLI authenticated: gcloud auth login and gcloud auth application-default login.
• Project Owner (or equivalent) IAM on the project.
• RAD platform access with permission to deploy modules into the project.

Set these shell variables once; every task below reuses them:

export PROJECT="<your-gcp-project-id>"
export REGION="us-central1"          # the region you deploy into

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Task 1 — Deploy the module [Automated]

1. Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open Chroma (Cloud Run) from the Platform Modules list to start configuration, set project_id, and review the inputs. Configure only what you need — the Configuration Guide documents every input by group, with defaults. Review the estimated cost (if credits are enabled) and click Deploy, which opens the deployment status page with real-time logs.

2. The platform provisions the Cloud Run service, a Cloud Storage bucket (mounted via GCS FUSE at /data as Chroma's persistence backend), builds the container image, and optionally creates a Secret Manager auth token. Chroma requires no database and no initialisation job. First deploys take roughly 10–15 minutes (image build dominates).

3. When it completes, discover the resources with name-agnostic filters:

   SERVICE=$(gcloud run services list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" \
     --filter="metadata.name~chroma" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
   SERVICE_URL=$(gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" \
     --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --format="value(status.url)")
   echo "Service: $SERVICE"
   echo "URL:     $SERVICE_URL"

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Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]

1. Confirm the service is healthy. Chroma exposes a single health endpoint:

   curl -s "$SERVICE_URL/api/v2/heartbeat"   # expect {"nanosecond heartbeat": <timestamp>}

   Note: The service URL is internal by default (ingress_settings = "internal"). Run this command from a machine within the VPC, or change to ingress_settings = "all" with enable_auth_token = true before deploying.

2. If enable_auth_token = true was set at deploy time, retrieve the auth token from Secret Manager before making further API calls:

   AUTH_SECRET=$(gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" \
     --filter="name~chroma AND name~auth-token" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
   gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret="$AUTH_SECRET" --project="$PROJECT"

   Pass the token as Authorization: Bearer <token> on every API request.

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Task 3 — Operate & keep it running (Day-2) [Manual]

1. Inspect the service and its revisions (each deploy creates an immutable revision; traffic shifts to the newest healthy one):

   gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
   gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"

2. Scale by changing the min/max instance inputs and clicking Update on the deployment details page — the module owns the service spec, so scaling is a configuration change, not a manual gcloud edit (a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply). Keep max_instance_count = 1: multiple instances sharing the same GCS FUSE path have no distributed write lock and will corrupt collections.

3. Update the application version by changing the version input via Update on the deployment details page; a new image builds and a new revision rolls out.

4. Manage secrets and storage:

   gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~chroma"
   DATA_BUCKET=$(gcloud storage buckets list --project="$PROJECT" \
     --filter="name~chroma" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
   gcloud storage ls "gs://${DATA_BUCKET}/"   # inspect Chroma's on-disk layout

5. List any scheduled backup jobs:

   gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"

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Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]

1. Logs — from the CLI or the Logs Explorer:

   gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=50

   Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="cloud_run_revision" AND resource.labels.service_name="<service>".

2. Monitoring — open the Cloud Run dashboard for the service and review request count, request latency (P50/P95/P99), instance count (scaling behaviour), and CPU / memory utilisation. The module also provisions an uptime check targeting /api/v2/heartbeat; confirm it is green under Monitoring → Uptime checks, and review Alerting → Policies.

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Task 5 — Troubleshoot & debug [Manual]

Durable techniques for the failure modes you are most likely to hit. These are platform-level diagnostics and do not change with Chroma releases.

• Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its logs for startup errors. Chroma loads HNSW indexes from the GCS bucket on startup — allow time for the /api/v2/heartbeat probe to pass.

  gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
  gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=100

• GCS FUSE mount errors: verify the GCS bucket exists, the service account has storage.objectAdmin on the bucket, and execution_environment = "gen2" is set (GCS FUSE requires Gen2).
• Auth token errors (401): confirm enable_auth_token = true was set, the secret exists, and the Authorization: Bearer <token> header is included in every request.
• Image build failed: review Cloud Build history for the failed build's log.
• 403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas.

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Task 6 — Tear down [Automated]

On the Deployments page, open the deployment and click the Trash icon (Delete). Delete runs terraform destroy and is irreversible (the deployment record is retained for history). If a deployment is stuck and the RAD platform can no longer manage it (for example after manual changes that conflict with the Terraform state), use Purge instead — it removes the deployment from RAD's records without destroying the cloud resources (it makes RAD forget the project). This removes everything the module created — the Cloud Run service, GCS data bucket and all stored collections, Secret Manager secrets, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, shared registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

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Summary

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module provisions Cloud Run, GCS data bucket, and optional auth token
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Heartbeat check passes; auth token retrieved if enabled
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets and storage
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose revision, GCS FUSE mount, auth token, build, and IAM issues
6 — Tear down	Automated	Delete (Trash) removes all module resources