What is Milvus?
Milvus is an open-source vector database built specifically for storing, indexing, and searching massive collections of embedding vectors at scale. It provides high-performance similarity search capabilities with support for multiple index types, distance metrics, and deployment configurations. Milvus emphasizes scalability and performance, designed to handle billions of vectors with millisecond-latency queries in production environments.
The system offers flexible indexing strategies including FLAT for exact search, IVF indexes for speed-accuracy tradeoffs, HNSW for high-recall approximate search, and specialized indexes optimized for different data characteristics. Milvus supports distributed deployment with separation of compute and storage, enabling horizontal scaling for both throughput and data volume. It includes features like metadata filtering, hybrid search, time travel queries, and multi-tenancy support.
Milvus has gained adoption in production AI applications requiring large-scale vector search, particularly in recommendation systems, image/video search, and enterprise RAG implementations. It integrates with popular frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex and provides SDKs for multiple programming languages. As an open-source project managed by the LF AI & Data Foundation, Milvus benefits from community contributions and enterprise support through Zilliz, the company founded by Milvus creators.