Exa Reversible Deployment Workflow

Overview

Deploy an Exa integration with server-side credentials, bounded concurrency, canary controls, and explicit rollback of scheduled work. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries.

Prerequisites

• The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner.
• The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy.
• Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check.

Current Contract

Production workers should call Exa from trusted server runtimes. Search and Contents can be synchronous, while Agent, Monitors, Websets, and Batch require durable IDs and terminal-state reconciliation. Deployments must account for queues and scheduled resources that outlive a process release.

Authentication

For normal REST work, inject EXA_API_KEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client.