An Introduction to Milvus Architecture

Milvus is a distributed system designed to scale vector operations, addressing the challenges of scalability in vector databases. Unlike traditional databases, vector data doesn't require complex transactions and has diverse use cases that necessitate tunable tradeoffs between performance and consistency. Some vector data operations are computationally expensive, requiring elastic resource allocation. Milvus achieves horizontal scaling through its deliberate design as a distributed system, overcoming the limitations of single-instance databases. It contains four layers: access, coordination, worker, and storage. The separation of concerns in querying, data ingestion, and indexing allows for independent scaling of each operation. Milvus ensures large-scale write consistency through sharding and supports pre-filtering metadata search to enhance efficiency. Its unique architecture provides benefits such as horizontal scaling and flexibility, making it a suitable choice for cloud-native vector databases catering to diverse use cases.