There is one API surface: a namespace you write to and query. Everything else — embedding, reranking, consistency, filtering — is a parameter on those two calls.
Isolation, billing, consistency and caching are all per namespace. Create one per tenant — a hundred million of them is a normal deployment, and idle ones cost nothing.
consistencyPer query, not per cluster. Strong reads see your last ack; bounded reads state their own upper limit on staleness; eventual reads skip the check entirely.
durabilityStandard writes are visible in about a second at $2/GB. Realtime writes commit synchronously across two zones in roughly 25 ms at $3/GB. Choose per call.
hybrid searchOne index format holds all three. Fuse dense and lexical results with reciprocal rank fusion server-side, or take both result sets and fuse them yourself.
branchingSegments are immutable, so a branch is a new manifest pointing at existing objects. Instant, free until you diverge, and safe to hand to a staging environment.
pipelineSend text instead of vectors and we embed it. Ask for reranking and a cross-encoder reorders candidates before the response leaves our network. Both are optional.
The single-node engine is Apache-2.0 and speaks the same API and the same segment format. Develop against a binary on your laptop, deploy against the managed service.