Vespa Product Updates, September 2021

Vespa's September 2021 product updates include several significant enhancements aimed at improving performance and usability. The Vespa CLI, a zero-dependency tool built with Go, simplifies interactions with Vespa instances across various operating systems, allowing users to clone, deploy, and query applications efficiently. Notable performance improvements include a 20x increase in exact nearest neighbor search performance without the HNSW index, reduced memory footprint for the HNSW index, and multithreaded reindexing capabilities. Additionally, Vespa now supports mTLS across internal services, enhancing security. Updates in feed performance have resulted in a substantial increase in throughput for both partial updates and summary-only data puts. The release also introduces the SentencePiece Embedder, allowing efficient transformation of natural language text into tensors for retrieval and ranking, with a flexible Embedder interface for custom algorithms. Vespa, largely developed by Yahoo engineers, continues to evolve through community feedback, serving as a robust open-source big data processing and serving engine used in various Yahoo products.