What is Milvus?

LFAI & DATAGraduate Project

Milvus is an open-source vector database built to handle billions of vectors and powers the largest AI applications in the world.

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Milvus video background

Built on a vibrant and growing community

  • 46K+

    GitHub stars

  • 4,000+

    Community

  • 100M+

    Downloads

  • 300+

    Contributors

Milvus community

How does Milvus work?

  • check markCoordinator Services

    Orchestrate load balancing and data management through coordinators, ensuring efficient data, query, and index management.

  • check markAccess Layer

    Handles external requests using stateless proxies to manage connections, perform verifications, and balance load.

  • check markWorker Nodes

    Executes tasks as scalable pods by implementing coordinator commands, enabling dynamic adjustment for changing data, query, and indexing demands.

  • check markStorage Layer

    Ensures data persistence through three components: meta stores, log brokers and object storage.

How does Milvus work?

Why Milvus?

Milvus is a cloud-native, open-source vector database powering Zilliz.

Scale as needed

Handles billions of vectors through its distributed architecture, separating storage and compute. Its microservice design allows scaling specific functions, optimizing resource use as you grow.

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Scale as needed

High Performance

Milvus offers diverse index types (HNSW, DiskANN, Quantization, Binary, etc.) and hardware-optimized designs for both CPU and GPU. This ensures fast vector retrieval with high recall across various use cases.

Benchmark
High Performance

Full Lifecycle Support

Milvus offers three deployment models with a unified API: Lite for prototyping, Standalone for testing and small-scale production, and Distributed for large-scale production—enabling seamless scaling without code rewrites.

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Full Development Lifecycle Support

Feature Rich

Supports multiple search types (top-K & Range ANN, sparse & dense, multi-vector, grouping), metadata filtering, and multi-tenancy. It includes admin tools and integrates with various AI tools and models.

Explore Milvus Notebooks
Feature Rich
“

Whenever we demonstrate our solution with Milvus, we’re effectively crushing the cloud vendor solution’s performance. It’s a great benchmark because most enterprise users already know the vendor solution, so the comparison is immediate."

Hanlian Lyu

a Product Owner and BI Expert at Volvo Cars

“

Milvus is renowned as one of the most advanced vector database platforms for AI applications. Rakuten Symphony engineers identified the Milvus Vector Database - an open source database which is horizontally scalable - as their platform of choice for LLM use and developing and maintaining AI applications."

Rakuten Symphony Engineering Team

“

When it comes to vector databases, Milvus has impressed us with its performance and scalability, meeting our stringent criteria for handling our AI use case backlog."

Team Lead

AI, ML, and Platform Solutions

“

I really like how Milvus' hybrid search allowed me to blend semantic and keyword search, which is crucial in a domain as technical and complex as EU policy."

Alessandro Saccoia

Co-Founder @ Veridien.ai

“

When we identify a need for specific data, we can often find the required data in our database the same day using text or image search with Milvus. This greatly improves our data processing efficiency and has a positive effect on our business operations."

Mr. Zhang

BOSCH’s principal software engineer

“

During batch ingestion tests, Milvus demonstrated that it could complete an entire collection dump into the database at speeds 5–10 times faster than competitors."

Team Lead

AI, ML, and Platform Solutions

“

We've got millions of monthly active users and all of the underlying data when we're trying to go find related conversations, find updates to an action item, find referenced documents...Milvus serves as the central repository and powers our information retrieval among billions of records."

Rob Williams

Co-Founder and CTO at Read AI

“

If I were to choose again, I would still choose Milvus at this point. The scalability, documentation quality, and continuous innovation make it the right foundation for our plagiarism detection platform."

Teis Petersen

Engineering Team Lead, UNIwise

“

Among Milvus's rich vector search capabilities, features such as support for multiple ANN index types, multi-vector support, and hybrid search have proven especially valuable in real-world service environments. As Milvus continues to evolve with new capabilities, NAVER expects even broader applications across its services."

NAVER Engineering Team

“

Milvus transformed our ability to detect semantic plagiarism at scale. We can now process variable workloads ranging from 10 to 10,000+ documents daily while maintaining cost-effectiveness, which would have been impossible with traditional solutions."

Teis Petersen

Engineering Team Lead, UNIwise

“

Milvus has become the bridge that connects our multi-modal foundation models with real-world applications. It's not just about performance – it's about enabling entirely new approaches to biological discovery that were previously impossible."

Xiaoming Zhang

VP of Technology at Biomap

“

Milvus has become the only technical choice for vector databases in our upcoming business expansion across the life sciences industry."

Xiaoming Zhang

VP of Technology at Biomap

“

Milvus’s real advantage was how easy and friendly it made things to understand and execute."

Hanlian Lyu

a Product Owner and BI Expert at Volvo Cars

“

Whenever we demonstrate our solution with Milvus, we’re effectively crushing the cloud vendor solution’s performance. It’s a great benchmark because most enterprise users already know the vendor solution, so the comparison is immediate."

Hanlian Lyu

a Product Owner and BI Expert at Volvo Cars

“

Milvus is renowned as one of the most advanced vector database platforms for AI applications. Rakuten Symphony engineers identified the Milvus Vector Database - an open source database which is horizontally scalable - as their platform of choice for LLM use and developing and maintaining AI applications."

Rakuten Symphony Engineering Team

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