Overview
TEI service status on the CPU AMI
Text Embeddings Inference 1.9 on a CPU instance: docker, tei and nginx active, the official TEI container serving on host loopback, and the open health endpoint returning HTTP 200.
TEI service status on the CPU AMI
TEI embeddings API
This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.
Overview Text Embeddings Inference (TEI) is Hugging Face's high-throughput, low-latency server for text embedding and reranking models. It serves models such as BGE, GTE, E5 and Sentence Transformers with dynamic batching and an OpenAI-compatible embeddings API, so existing OpenAI SDK code works unchanged. This image delivers TEI fully installed and configured as a system service, so a private, self-hosted embeddings endpoint is running within minutes of launch. The current release available is TEI 1.9.
CPU Optimised This image runs the official Hugging Face CPU container on ordinary general-purpose instances (m5, m6i families) with no GPU, no NVIDIA driver and no CUDA toolkit to manage. A compact open-weights embedding model is pre-downloaded at build time and served by default, so the API returns vectors immediately on first boot with no model download.
Application Stack TEI runs as the official Hugging Face container under Docker, bound to the host loopback address, with an nginx reverse proxy fronting it on port 80. A systemd service starts the container on boot and restarts it on failure. The embedding model lives on a dedicated, independently resizable storage volume kept separate from the operating system disk.
Secure By Default Access is gated by HTTP Basic Authentication at the nginx reverse proxy. This image generates a fresh password, unique to your instance, on its first boot and writes it to a root only file. The public health endpoint stays open for load balancers; the embedding and reranking endpoints require the password. No shared or default credentials ship in the image.
Ready To Use Generate embeddings from the OpenAI SDK or the native API, and feed them into a vector database such as Weaviate or Chroma for retrieval augmented generation. Serve a different embedding or reranking model by editing the model name in the service environment file.
cloudimg Support 24/7 technical support by email and chat. Help with TEI deployment, model selection, instance sizing, batching and throughput tuning, the OpenAI-compatible API, TLS termination and scaling.
Use Cases The embeddings backend of a private, self-hosted RAG pipeline in your own VPC. High-throughput batch embedding of documents. Reranking for search and retrieval. A drop-in OpenAI-compatible embeddings endpoint for teams with data residency or compliance requirements.
All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.
Highlights
- Hugging Face Text Embeddings Inference (TEI), the high-throughput embeddings and reranking server with an OpenAI-compatible API, preinstalled as a systemd-managed container behind an nginx reverse proxy on port 80
- Runs on cost-effective general-purpose CPU instances with no GPU required: a compact open-weights embedding model is pre-baked so the API returns vectors immediately on first boot, with no model download
- Secure by default: HTTP Basic Authentication with a unique password generated for every instance on first boot, plus 24/7 cloudimg support
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Dimension | Description | Cost/hour |
|---|---|---|
m5.large Recommended | m5.large | $0.08 |
t3.micro | t3.micro instance type | $0.04 |
t2.micro | t2.micro instance type | $0.04 |
c5d.large | c5d.large instance type | $0.08 |
c5d.xlarge | c5d.xlarge instance type | $0.12 |
m6a.2xlarge | m6a.2xlarge instance type | $0.24 |
m8id.metal-96xl | m8id.metal-96xl instance type | $0.24 |
c8i.24xlarge | c8i.24xlarge instance type | $0.24 |
d3en.2xlarge | d3en.2xlarge instance type | $0.24 |
c8i-flex.large | c8i-flex.large instance type | $0.08 |
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Refunds available on request.
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Delivery details
64-bit (x86) Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
An AMI is a virtual image that provides the information required to launch an instance. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances are virtual servers on which you can run your applications and workloads, offering varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources. You can launch as many instances from as many different AMIs as you need.
Version release notes
Initial release of Hugging Face Text Embeddings Inference for CPU-based, OpenAI-compatible text embeddings and reranking.
Additional details
Usage instructions
Launch on a general-purpose instance type (m5.large or larger). Connect via SSH on port 22 as the default login user for your operating system variant (the user guide lists it per variant; on Ubuntu it is 'ubuntu'). TEI is served by nginx on port 80. Retrieve the generated password with: sudo cat /root/tei-credentials.txt. The health endpoint is open at http://<instance-public-ip>/health; everything else is gated by HTTP Basic Authentication (user 'admin' plus the password). Generate embeddings: curl -u admin:<password> http://<instance-public-ip>/embed -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"inputs":"your text"}'. The OpenAI-compatible endpoint is http://<instance-public-ip>/v1/embeddings. The container runs on host loopback 127.0.0.1:8000 and is managed with systemctl (docker.service, tei.service, nginx.service). Serve a different model by editing MODEL in /etc/tei/tei.env and restarting tei.service. The user guide covers the OpenAI SDK, feeding a vector database, model selection and enabling HTTPS.
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Vendor support
cloudimg provides 24/7 technical support for this product by email and live chat. Our engineers help with deployment, configuration, updates, performance tuning and troubleshooting; critical issues receive a one hour average response. Contact support@cloudimg.co.uk .
AWS infrastructure support
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