Anatomy of A Cloud Native Vector Database Management System

The paper "Manu: A Cloud Native Vector Database Management System" discusses the design philosophy and principles behind Manu, a cloud native database purpose built for vector data management. The authors identify four common business requirements for vector databases that are difficult to address under the initial framework: ever-changing requirements, flexible consistency policy, component-level elasticity, and simpler transaction processing model. To meet these needs, they propose five broad objectives for Manu: long-term evolvability, tunable consistency, good elasticity, high availability, and high performance. The paper then delves into the architecture of Manu, which adopts a four-layer design that enables decoupling of read from write, stateless from stateful, and storage from computing. It also explains the data processing workflow inside Manu, including data insertion, index building, and query execution. The authors conduct an overall system performance evaluation and compare Manu with other vector search systems in terms of query performance. They conclude by discussing future directions for research into cloud-native vector database management systems.