Qdrant 1.16 on Ubuntu by cloudimg

Qdrant 1.16 on Ubuntu 22.04 by cloudimg

Qdrant 1.16 Community edition on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, packaged and supported by cloudimg as an Azure Marketplace virtual machine image.

Qdrant is an open source vector similarity search engine written in Rust, licensed under Apache 2.0. It stores high dimensional vectors with JSON payloads and performs approximate nearest neighbour search with filtering, purpose built for retrieval augmented generation pipelines, semantic search, recommendation systems, image similarity, and anomaly detection. Qdrant 1.16 includes the improved HNSW index, sparse vector support, and hybrid search combining dense and sparse vectors in a single query. The server is a single statically compiled Rust binary with no Java, no Python, and no other embedded runtime, which keeps the image runtime CVE surface clean.

Pre configured for production posture on day one

• Qdrant 1.16 installed from the official GitHub release tarball (statically linked musl binary)
• HTTP API on port 6333 and gRPC API on port 6334, both bound to 0.0.0.0
• api_key authentication enforced on every HTTP and gRPC call
• Unique 64 character hex api_key generated on the very first boot of every deployed virtual machine, written to a root only credentials file
• Payloads stored on disk by default so RAM stays reserved for the HNSW graph and vector data
• Web dashboard bundled from the upstream qdrant web ui project, served at http colon port 6333 slash dashboard slash
• systemd supervision with a firstboot oneshot that rotates the api_key on customer first boot then disables itself

What this image is

• A production ready single node Qdrant server ready to ingest vectors and serve similarity searches on day one
• Pre installed from the official upstream release, with systemd units and a YAML config cloudimg owns
• Hardened by cloudimg: credentials never baked into the image, SSH keys truncated not deleted to preserve Azure deployment injection, build time admin user removed to pass Azure Marketplace certification

What this image is not

• Not a replicated Qdrant cluster. The image is single node by design
• Not TLS encrypted out of the box. Terminate TLS via nginx or Caddy before production use
• Not the Qdrant Cloud managed service. This is the Apache 2.0 licensed open source server, self managed on your own Azure subscription

Components

• Qdrant 1.16, pinned at build time, installed from github.com slash qdrant slash qdrant slash releases
• Binary: /usr/local/bin/qdrant
• Data Directory: /var/lib/qdrant (storage, snapshots, HNSW indexes, static dashboard assets)
• Config: /etc/qdrant/config.yaml
• Default OS User: your chosen admin user
• Qdrant OS User: qdrant
• Recommended Size: Standard_D4s_v3 (4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM) because vector search is memory intensive and the HNSW index lives in RAM
• VM Generation: Hyper V Gen2 with UEFI boot

Security

• Latest CVE patches applied at build time
• SSH hardened with key based authentication
• api_key authentication enforced out of the box, unique per virtual machine
• Recommended to restrict ports 6333 and 6334 to application subnets in the NSG and terminate TLS with a reverse proxy before production

Support

cloudimg provides 24/7/365 expert technical support. Guaranteed response within 24 hours, one hour average for critical issues. Contact support at cloudimg dot co dot uk.

Visit www dot cloudimg dot co dot uk slash guides slash qdrant 1 16 on ubuntu 22 04 azure for the full user guide.