Vespa
Vespa is an open-source AI search engine, big-data serving engine, and vector database originally developed inside Yahoo and spun out as Vespa.ai AS. Vespa combines vector search, text search (BM25), structured filtering, and machine-learned ranking — including native tensor inference — into a single distributed serving engine that scales to billions of documents with sub-100ms latency. Vespa Cloud is the fully managed commercial offering operated by the Vespa.ai team across AWS and GCP, with Startup, Basic, Commercial, and Enterprise plans plus a Self-Managed option for customers running the open-source engine on their own infrastructure. Vespa is widely used at Spotify, Perplexity, Yahoo, Farfetch, and Elicit for search, recommendation, personalization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Solid contracts, transparent operations, and an easy start — typically complete on four or five facets with one clear soft spot.
API Evangelist profiles Vespa the way a machine reads it — 62 machine-readable artifacts across 8 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Vespa scores 62.8/100 (strong), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Vespa
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Vespa. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 8
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Vespa Document API
The Vespa Document API (/document/v1) provides synchronous REST access to document operations against a Vespa content cluster. It supports Put, Get, Update (partial update with ...
Vespa Deploy API
The Vespa Deploy API (/application/v2) manages application packages on a Vespa configuration server. It supports preparing, activating, and tearing down application packages, se...
Vespa Tenant and Application API
The Vespa Tenant API (/application/v2/tenant) manages tenants and applications hosted on a Vespa configuration server or Vespa Cloud control plane. It exposes operations for cre...
Vespa Config API
The Vespa Config API (/config/v2) lets services in a Vespa application retrieve their configuration from a Vespa configuration server using the config-server / config-proxy prot...
Vespa Cluster Controller API
The Vespa Cluster Controller API (/cluster/v2) exposes runtime state and management endpoints for a Vespa content cluster — including node state queries, maintenance-mode transi...
Vespa State API
The Vespa State API (/state/v1) exposes per-service health, version, and metrics endpoints for any Vespa node — used by orchestration tooling, monitoring agents, and load balanc...
Vespa Metrics API
Vespa exposes a family of metrics endpoints (/metrics/v1, /metrics/v2, /prometheus/v1) that publish Vespa engine and application metrics in JSON or Prometheus exposition format ...
Vespa Query API
The Query API from Vespa — 1 operation(s) for query.
Scroll within the panel for all 8 ·
Open Collections 1
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
Vespa Query API
OPEN COLLECTIONPricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Vespa Ai Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Vespa Ai Finops
FINOPSFeatures 20
The notable capabilities this provider advertises, captured as structured features so they can be searched and compared instead of read one landing page at a time.
Notable capabilities this provider offers.
Scroll within the panel for all 20 ·
Semantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Vespa Ai Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 2
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
Vespa API Rules
SPECTRALVespa API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 2
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
VespaDocument
JSON SCHEMAVespaQuery
JSON SCHEMAJSON Structure 1
JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.
JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.
Vespa Ai Document Structure
JSON STRUCTUREExamples 2
Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Vespa Ai Query Example
EXAMPLESecurity Posture 3
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Use Cases 6
What developers actually build with this provider — captured so the catalogue answers 'what is this for', not just 'what does this expose'.
What developers build with this provider.
Hybrid Search
Combine BM25 text relevance with vector similarity and structured filters in a single query executed by Vespa's multi-phase ranking pipeline.
Retrieval Augmented Generation
Serve grounded context to large language models by indexing documents, chunks, and embeddings in Vespa and retrieving them with hybrid search at sub-100ms latency.
Recommendation and Personalization
Power recommendation systems with machine-learned ranking, real-time feature updates, and tensor inference over user and item embeddings.
Ad Targeting and Real-Time Bidding
Match candidate ads against user context and serve ranked impressions within tight latency budgets using Vespa's distributed serving engine.
E-Commerce Search and Browse
Combine faceted navigation, structured filters, text relevance, and learned ranking for large product catalogs with frequent updates.
Streaming Search for Personal Data
Run "streaming search" mode that scans a user's personal corpus on demand — ideal for mail, messaging, and document search where each user has their own private index.
Integrations 12
Pre-built integrations with other platforms tell you where this provider already fits in a stack.
Pre-built integrations with other platforms and tools.
AWS
Google Cloud
Prometheus
Grafana
TensorFlow
ONNX Runtime
XGBoost
LightGBM
Kubernetes
LangChain
LlamaIndex
Haystack
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Resources
Every other property we hold for Vespa — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 2
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 3
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 9
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Scroll within the panel for all 9 ·
Access & Security 3
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Learn 1
Tutorials, courses, talks, and written guidance
Operate 4
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 4
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 3
The organization behind the API
Other 2
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/vespa-ai · machine-readable index on apis.io