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Vector Database 101: Everything You Need to Know

Milvus Quickstart: Install Milvus Vector Database in 5 Minutes

Oct 21, 20227 min read

Milvus vector database supports two modes of deployments: standalone and cluster.

Read the entire series

Hey there - welcome back to Vector Database 101.

In the previous tutorial, we provided a brief introduction to Milvus, Milvus' history, as well as the primary differences between Milvus 1.x and Milvus 2.x. We also took a quick tour of the architecture of Milvus 2.x and helped shine some light on how Milvus' architecture allows it to implement all of the required features of vector databases.

If you haven't read the previous tutorials (unstructured data, vector database, Milvus introduction), I recommend you go ahead and read them. If you have, great. Let's get started with Milvus!

In this tutorial, we look at different deployments, followed with a step-by-step guide for installing your first vector database.

Let's get started

We offer two different modes of deployment: standalone and cluster. In Milvus standalone, all nodes - coordinators, worker nodes, and forward-facing proxies - are deployed as a single instance. For persistent data and metadata, Milvus standalone relies on MinIO and etcd, respectively. In future releases, we hope to eliminate these two third-party dependencies, allowing everything to run in a single process and removing the need to install third-party dependencies.

Milvus cluster is our full-fledged version of Milvus, complete with separate instances/pods for all eight microservice components along with three third-party dependencies: MinIO, etcd, and Pulsar (Pulsar serves as the log broker and provides log pub/sub services). If you haven't gotten the chance to take a look at the Milvus overview from the previous slide, please do so! It'll help clarify what each of these third party dependencies is used for and why we've included them in Milvus cluster.

Milvus standalone (`docker-compose`)

Milvus standalone is meant to be super easy to install. In this section, we'll go over how docker-compose can be used to install Milvus. You can view the recommended prerequisites on Milvus documentation page.

Let's first download the docker-compose.yml configuration file needed for the standalone installation. If you're on any Debian-based Linux (including Ubuntu), you can use the following command:

wget https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/download/v2.4.12/milvus-standalone-docker-compose.yml -O docker-compose.yml
sudo docker compose up -d

    Resolving objects.githubusercontent.com (objects.githubusercontent.com)... 185.199.108.133, 185.199.111.133, 185.199.109.133, ...
    Connecting to objects.githubusercontent.com (objects.githubusercontent.com)|185.199.108.133|:443... connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
    Length: 1303 (1.3K) [application/octet-stream]
    Saving to: docker-compose.yml

    docker-compose.yml  100%[===================>]   1.27K  --.-KB/s    in 0s

    2022-06-29 13:58:49 (113 MB/s) - docker-compose.yml saved [1303/1303]

Alternatively, if you're on MacOS, make sure you have Docker Desktop installed first. I recommend using brew:

% brew install --cask docker

You can then follow this up with the command below:

% curl https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/download/v2.0.2/milvus-standalone-docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml

With everything ready, we can now spin up our Milvus standalone instance:

$ docker-compose up -d

Docker Compose is now in the Docker CLI, try docker compose up

    Creating milvus-etcd  ... done
    Creating milvus-minio ... done
    Creating milvus-standalone ... done

Now, we can check on the status of our containers

$ docker ps -a

    CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                      COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS                    PORTS                      NAMES
    711d54ab15c7   milvusdb/milvus:v2.0.2                     "/tini -- milvus run…"   42 seconds ago   Up 40 seconds             0.0.0.0:19530->19530/tcp   milvus-standalone
    0d85f4927864   minio/minio:RELEASE.2020-12-03T00-03-10Z   "/usr/bin/docker-ent…"   42 seconds ago   Up 40 seconds (healthy)   9000/tcp                   milvus-minio
    99de39278b35   quay.io/coreos/etcd:v3.5.0                 "etcd -advertise-cli…"   42 seconds ago   Up 40 seconds             2379-2380/tcp              milvus-etcd

Here's a quick rundown of what each of the containers are doing. milvus-standalone is the compiled/compressed version of Milvus, mean to run on a single machine.

To stop Milvus standalone, run:

$ docker-compose down

And that's it for Milvus standalone! Easy, right?

Milvus standalone (`apt`)

We also provide a handy apt package for Debian-based distributions. Simply run:

$ sudo apt install software-properties-common
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:milvusdb/milvus
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install milvus

Once that's done, you're good to go. You can check the status of the running services with:

$ sudo systemctl status milvus
$ sudo systemctl status milvus-etcd
$ sudo systemctl status milvus-minio

Milvus cluster

From the previous tutorial, we know that Milvus is composed of four primary components: the access layer, coordinator service, worker nodes, and object storage. Requests are sent to a cluster of proxies in the access layer, which then forwards the requests to either the coordinator layer or a streaming service for vector data. The stateful coordinator nodes within the coordinator service manage and control all of the stateless worker nodes, allowing for easy horizontal scaling. Object storage is accomplished via S3 or any "S3-like" storage layer, allowing Milvus to be run both in the cloud and on-premises via MinIO.

Milvus' remaining third-party dependencies, Pulsar/Kafka and etcd, are also distributed and cloud-native, allowing the entirety of Milvus to run via Kubernetes as an orchestration engine. Using Kubernetes is a no-brainer for nearly all distributed applications, as it provides out-of-the-box support for application deployment, maintanence, and scaling. We recommend deploying Milvus as a Kubernetes application via Helm:

% helm repo add milvus https://milvus-io.github.io/milvus-helm/

"milvus" has been added to your repositories

Now, let's grab the latest Milvus chart from the milvus-io/milvus-helm repository.

% helm repo update

    Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
    ...Successfully got an update from the "milvus" chart repository
    Update Complete. Happy Helming

Great. Now that we've gotten all of the dependencies out of the way, let's install Milvus (cluster)!

% helm install my-release milvus/milvus

    W0629 16:01:00.674407   21803 warnings.go:70 policy/v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget is deprecated in v1.21+, unavailable in v1.25+; use policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget
    W0629 16:01:00.676536   21803 warnings.go:70 policy/v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget is deprecated in v1.21+, unavailable in v1.25+; use policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget
    W0629 16:01:00.678594   21803 warnings.go:70 policy/v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget is deprecated in v1.21+, unavailable in v1.25+; use policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget
    W0629 16:01:00.680671   21803 warnings.go:70 policy/v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget is deprecated in v1.21+, unavailable in v1.25+; use policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget
    W0629 16:01:00.808448   21803 warnings.go:70 policy/v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget is deprecated in v1.21+, unavailable in v1.25+; use policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget
    W0629 16:01:00.809339   21803 warnings.go:70 policy/v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget is deprecated in v1.21+, unavailable in v1.25+; use policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget
    W0629 16:01:00.809344   21803 warnings.go:70 policy/v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget is deprecated in v1.21+, unavailable in v1.25+; use policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget
    W0629 16:01:00.809594   21803 warnings.go:70 policy/v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget is deprecated in v1.21+, unavailable in v1.25+; use policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget
    NAME: my-release
    LAST DEPLOYED: Wed Jun 29 16:01:00 2022
    NAMESPACE: default
    STATUS: deployed
    REVISION: 1
    TEST SUITE: None

With this done, we can now see the pods that are up and running via kubectl:

$ kubectl get pods

    NAME                                             READY  STATUS   RESTARTS  AGE
    my-release-etcd-0                                1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-etcd-1                                1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-etcd-2                                1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-milvus-datacoord-6fd4bd885c-gkzwx     1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-milvus-datanode-68cb87dcbd-4khpm      1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-milvus-indexcoord-5bfcf6bdd8-nmh5l    1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-milvus-indexnode-5c5f7b5bd9-l8hjg     1/1    Running   0        2m24s
    my-release-milvus-proxy-6bd7f5587-ds2xv          1/1    Running   0        2m24s
    my-release-milvus-querycoord-579cd79455-xht5n    1/1    Running   0        2m24s
    my-release-milvus-querynode-5cd8fff495-k6gtg     1/1    Running   0        2m24s
    my-release-milvus-rootcoord-7fb9488465-dmbbj     1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-minio-0                               1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-minio-1                               1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-minio-2                               1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-minio-3                               1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-pulsar-autorecovery-86f5dbdf77-lchpc  1/1    Running   0        2m24s
    my-release-pulsar-bookkeeper-0                   1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-pulsar-bookkeeper-1                   1/1    Running   0        98s
    my-release-pulsar-broker-556ff89d4c-2m29m        1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-pulsar-proxy-6fbd75db75-nhg4v         1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-pulsar-zookeeper-0                    1/1    Running   0        2m23s
    my-release-pulsar-zookeeper-metadata-98zbr       1/1   Completed  0        2m24s

That's it! You now have Milvus installed directly on your on-premises cluster. Check out our next tutorial to see how to create a collection within Milvus and begin inserting and querying embeddings.

If you're interested in running Milvus on cloud infrastructure check out the Milvus standalone on AWS Marketplace.

Wrapping up

In this tutorial, we took a look at how to install the standalone version of Milvus (via docker-compose) and the cluster version of Milvus (via helm). The standalone version is suitable for testing purposes, while the cluster version is suitable for internal clusters or on-premises deployments. In the next tutorial, we'll look at basic Milvus operations: connecting to a Milvus server, creating a collection (equivalent to a table in relational databases), creating a partition within the collection, inserting embedding vector data, and conducting a vector search.

See you in the next couple of tutorials.