Milvus is an open-source vector database built for GenAI applications, enabling organizations to manage and search vast amounts of unstructured data using advanced vector embeddings. Milvus supports high-speed semantic similarity search and scales seamlessly to tens of billions of vectors with minimal performance loss, making it a core infrastructure component for artificial intelligence, search, and recommendation systems.
How Does Milvus Work?
Milvus is designed to handle unstructured data—such as text, images, and audio—by converting it into numerical vector representations. This allows for fast, accurate similarity searches using algorithms like Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN). Key features include:
- Diverse deployment options: Milvus Lite (for prototyping), Milvus Standalone (single-machine production), Milvus Distributed (enterprise-scale), and Zilliz Cloud (fully managed SaaS).
- Elastic, scalable architecture with support for handling billions of vectors.
- Over 10 index types, including HNSW, IVF, Product Quantization, and GPU-based indexes for flexible, efficient search.
- Versatile search capabilities: top-K ANN, range ANN, metadata filtering, and hybrid search.
- Tunable consistency and hardware-accelerated compute for high performance.
What Makes Milvus Unique?
Milvus stands out due to its open-source model, robust scalability, and support for a wide range of indexing and search methods tailored to GenAI and machine learning workloads. The latest version, Milvus 2.6, introduces innovations such as RaBiT 1-bit Quantization (yielding up to 72% memory reduction and 4x faster queries per second), 400% faster full-text search compared to Elasticsearch, advanced JSON Path indexing, and a data pipeline that streamlines the process from raw data to search results.
Who Uses Milvus?
Milvus is trusted by over 10,000 organizations worldwide, ranging from technology giants to enterprises across different industries. Notable users include:
- IKEA
- NVIDIA
- Walmart
- eBay
- IBM
- Salesforce
- Shutterstock
- AT&T
- ZipRecruiter
- Smart News
- Shopee
- Tokopedia
- Bosch
- Intuit
- New Relic
- PayPal
- ROBLOX
These organizations leverage Milvus to power search, recommendation, and AI-driven features at massive scale.
Who Leads Milvus?
Milvus was founded by Charles Xie, whose expertise has guided the project’s growth into a leading open-source vector database platform for AI and data-intensive applications.
What Are Milvus's Deployment Options?
Milvus offers several deployment models to suit different needs:
- Milvus Lite: Ideal for learning, prototyping, and development.
- Milvus Standalone: Suited for single-machine production or testing environments with up to millions of vectors.
- Milvus Distributed: Enterprise-grade, distributed solution for scaling to billions of vectors.
- Zilliz Cloud: Fully-managed, cloud-based service for hassle-free operation and accelerated performance.
Each option is designed to make vector search accessible and efficient for teams of all sizes.
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