Milvus is a distributed vector database developed by Zilliz. It is available as both open-source software and a cloud service.
Milvus is an open-source project under LF AI & Data Foundation distributed under the Apache License 2.0.
History.
Milvus has been developed by Zilliz since 2017.
Milvus joined Linux Foundation as an incubation project in and became a graduate in . The details about its architecture and possible applications were presented on ACM SIGMOD Conference in 2021
Milvus 2.0, a major redesign of the whole product with a new architecture, was released in .
Features.
Similarity search.
Major similarity search related features that are available in the active 2.4.x Milvus branch:
Milvus similarity search engine relies on heavily-modified forks of third-party open-source similarity search libraries, such as Faiss, DiskANN and hnswlib.
Milvus includes optimizations for I/O data layout, specific to graph search indices.
Database.
As a database, Milvus provides the following features:
Deployment options.
Milvus can be deployed as an embedded database, standalone server, or distributed cluster. Zillis Cloud offers a fully managed version.
GPU support.
Milvus provides GPU accelerated index building and search using Nvidia CUDA technology via Nvidia RAFT library, including a recent GPU-based graph indexing algorithm Nvidia CAGRA
Integration.
Milvus provides official SDK clients for Java, NodeJS, Python and Go. An additional C# SDK client was contributed by Microsoft. The database can integrate with Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and alerts, frameworks Haystack and LangChain, IBM Watsonx, and OpenAI models.