What is a production readiness checklist for a ChromaDB-based application?

Moving a ChromaDB application from prototype to production involves several architectural decisions around storage, concurrency, reliability, and observability. This checklist covers the key concerns.

# Minimal production-ready ChromaDB setup
import chromadb
from chromadb.utils import embedding_functions
from chromadb.config import Settings
import os
import logging

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO)
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

EMBEDDING_MODEL = "text-embedding-3-small"
COLLECTION_NAME = "prod_knowledge_base"

def create_client():
    return chromadb.HttpClient(
        host=os.environ["CHROMA_HOST"],
        port=int(os.environ.get("CHROMA_PORT", 8000)),
        settings=Settings(anonymized_telemetry=False),
    )

def get_collection(client):
    ef = embedding_functions.OpenAIEmbeddingFunction(
        api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"],
        model_name=EMBEDDING_MODEL,
    )
    return client.get_or_create_collection(
        name=COLLECTION_NAME,
        embedding_function=ef,
        metadata={
            "hnsw:space":           "cosine",
            "hnsw:construction_ef": 200,
            "hnsw:search_ef":       100,
            "embedding_model":      EMBEDDING_MODEL,
        },
    )

client = create_client()
client.heartbeat()   # fail fast if server is unreachable
collection = get_collection(client)
logger.info(f"Connected to collection with {collection.count()} documents")