What is Milvus?
Milvus is a high-performance vector database built for scale. It powers AI applications by organizing and searching large amounts of unstructured data such as text, images and multi-modal information. It is written in Go and C++ and uses hardware acceleration for CPU and GPU.
According to the README, its fully distributed, Kubernetes-native architecture lets Milvus scale horizontally, handle tens of thousands of search queries on billions of vectors, and keep data fresh with real-time streaming updates. Milvus also supports a Standalone mode for single-machine deployment, and Milvus Lite is a lightweight version for quickstarts in Python installed with pip.
The project is under the LF AI & Data Foundation and is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, with Zilliz as its major contributor. Milvus is also available as a fully managed service on Zilliz Cloud. The community uses Discord for questions and GitHub for issues and discussions.
Key capabilities
- Vector search over text, image and multi-modal data.
- Milvus Lite for a quickstart with pip in Python.
- Standalone mode for single-machine deployment.
- A distributed, Kubernetes-native architecture that scales horizontally.
- A fully managed option on Zilliz Cloud.
Where Milvus fits
- Vector search with filtering Vectors are stored together with scalar types such as integers, strings and JSON objects, so searches can use metadata filtering or hybrid search.
- Index types The engine supports the major vector index types, including HNSW, IVF, FLAT, SCANN and DiskANN.
- Hardware acceleration Hardware acceleration improves search performance, and GPU indexing is supported.
- Independent scaling Compute and storage are separate, so query nodes scale for read-heavy loads and data nodes for write-heavy loads.
- Multi-tenancy Isolation at database, collection, partition or partition key level lets one cluster handle hundreds to millions of tenants.
- Hot and cold storage Frequently accessed data can sit in memory or on SSDs, while less-accessed data goes to cheaper storage.
- Deployment modes Milvus Lite installs with pip for quickstarts, Standalone runs on one machine, and Zilliz Cloud offers a managed service.
Install
pip install -U pymilvusReviews of Milvus
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