Pinecone’s private endpoints let your VPC talk to Pinecone’s vector database without sending traffic over the public internet.
Imagine you’re running a service in AWS, and you need to query your Pinecone index. Normally, your EC2 instance would make a standard HTTPS request to your-index.your-environment.pinecone.io. This traffic goes out to the internet, hits Pinecone’s public load balancers, and then comes back into Pinecone’s network.
With a private endpoint, that path changes drastically. Instead of hitting a public IP, your VPC gets its own Elastic Network Interface (ENI) within your subnet. This ENI has a private IP address. When your application queries Pinecone, it’s now talking directly to this ENI within your VPC. This ENI acts as a gateway, securely forwarding traffic to Pinecone’s backend infrastructure over AWS’s private backbone.
Here’s how it looks in practice.
First, you need to provision a private endpoint in your AWS account. This is done via the Pinecone console or API. You’ll specify the AWS region, the VPC ID, and the subnets where you want the private endpoint ENIs to reside.
# Example of creating a private endpoint via Pinecone CLI (conceptually)
pinecone api private-endpoints create \
--name my-vpc-endpoint \
--region us-east-1 \
--vpc-id vpc-0123456789abcdef0 \
--subnet-ids subnet-0a1b2c3d4e5f67890,subnet-1a2b3c4d5e6f78901 \
--security-group-ids sg-0fedcba9876543210
Once created, Pinecone will provision the ENIs in your specified subnets. You’ll see these ENIs in your AWS VPC console. You then need to configure your DNS to resolve your Pinecone index hostname (e.g., my-index.us-east-1-aws.pinecone.io) to the private IP address of one of these ENIs.
This is crucial. You’ll typically use an AWS Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) and an A record.
Let’s say your Pinecone index is my-index.us-east-1-aws.pinecone.io. You’ll create a PHZ for us-east-1-aws.pinecone.io. Then, within that PHZ, you’ll create an A record for my-index that points to the private IP of your ENI.
// Example AWS Route 53 Private Hosted Zone configuration
{
"Comment": "Private DNS for Pinecone",
"Changes": [
{
"Action": "CREATE",
"ResourceRecordSet": {
"Name": "my-index.us-east-1-aws.pinecone.io.",
"Type": "A",
"TTL": 300,
"ResourceRecords": [
{"Value": "10.0.1.15"} // The private IP of your Pinecone ENI
]
}
}
]
}
Your EC2 instances or other AWS resources within that VPC (or peered VPCs with correct routing and DNS resolution) will now resolve my-index.us-east-1-aws.pinecone.io to the private IP of the ENI. When your application makes an API call, it’s sent directly to that ENI, which routes it to Pinecone’s network via AWS’s internal network.
The primary benefit is enhanced security and reduced latency. Traffic stays within AWS’s network, avoiding the public internet and its potential exposure. For applications sensitive to network hops and latency, this can lead to faster query responses.
The security group attached to the ENI is critical for controlling ingress traffic from your VPC. You’ll need to allow outbound traffic on port 443 from your application’s security group to the security group of the Pinecone private endpoint ENI.
# Example AWS CLI command to modify a security group
aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress \
--group-id sg-0fedcba9876543210 \
--protocol tcp \
--port 443 \
--source-group sg-your-app-security-group-id
The security group on the application side also needs to allow outbound traffic to the private IP of the ENI.
The most surprising thing is that your application code doesn’t change. You continue to use the same Pinecone client libraries and API endpoints. The magic happens entirely in the network and DNS configuration. You point your existing client calls at a hostname that now resolves to a private IP within your AWS environment, and the rest is handled by the private endpoint infrastructure.
The next thing you’ll likely encounter is managing the lifecycle of these private endpoints, including updates and potential region-specific configurations.