Vector Retrieval Service for Milvus:Compare Milvus and self-managed Milvus on ECS

Comparison item

Milvus

Self-managed Milvus on ECS

Resource cost

• One-click instance activation with no additional costs for components such as Kafka or etcd.

• Supports Auto Scaling. Flexibly adjust node specifications and quantity.

• Requires purchasing ECS instances and components such as Kafka and etcd, plus manually deploying and maintaining a Kubernetes environment with expert technical knowledge.

• Supply constraints may arise during traffic peaks, and idle resources during low-traffic periods can lead to waste.

Network cost

• Intra-region traffic over the internal network is free.

• Free public network access. Cross-region communication over the public network incurs no data transfer fees.

• Intra-region traffic over the internal network is free.

• Cross-region communication over the public network requires you to pay for public bandwidth usage. For detailed pricing, see public bandwidth billing.

Labor and time

• Fully managed and ready to use out of the box. Pay only for what you use.

• A visual console minimizes O&M costs for cluster operations and management.

• Requires purchasing instances and manually deploying a Milvus cluster, with slow iteration cycles and high time costs.

• Requires a dedicated Milvus engineering team for resource management and cluster O&M, leading to high labor costs.

Risk cost

Alibaba Cloud guarantees 99.9% service reliability, minimizing IT risk and ensuring controllable business risk.

Self-managed Milvus clusters have no minimum reliability guarantee. Reducing business risk demands significant technical expertise and investment.

Post-sale support cost

Alibaba Cloud for technical support.

No post-sale technical support team is available. You must troubleshoot issues on your own.

Comparison item

Milvus

Self-managed Milvus on ECS

Usability

• Out-of-the-box deployment with elastic scaling. Adjust cluster configurations with one click.

• One-click cluster version upgrades.

• Over 100 infrastructure metrics in the console, with custom alert rules and an alert service.

• Complex deployment that requires manual resource adjustments.

• Kernel version stability must be maintained manually during upgrades.

• High operational complexity. Command-line tools are required to check the health of clusters, nodes, and indexes.

• Only basic monitoring is available. Advanced metrics require custom development.

Scenario support

• Optimized retrieval for Sparse and Binary data types, delivering several times better performance than the open source version.

• Seamlessly compatible with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and other frameworks. Integrates with Alibaba Cloud Platform for AI (PAI-EAS), Qwen, and other AI products to build a cloud-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solution with one click.

Requires custom development or open source integration.

Performance

Provides advanced ANN algorithms and sparse search algorithms, significantly boosting read/write throughput and vector retrieval performance.

Performance depends entirely on your implementation, which is technically challenging.

Availability

• Guarantees 99.9% data and service reliability.

• Visual data management with multi-replica components for high availability.

• Manual backups and cluster availability management are required.

• Disaster recovery deployment is difficult to set up.

• Manual setup and maintenance through the API is required.

Security

• Supports HTTPS encryption and encrypted data storage.

• Clusters are accessible only within a virtual private cloud (VPC) by default. Resource Access Management (RAM) policies control cluster access.

• Cross-zone redundant storage ensures normal access to business data.

• Alibaba Cloud RAM and role-based access control (RBAC) provide a multilayer security framework for user access.

• Relies only on basic ECS security features, with higher cluster-level security risks.

• Additional cloud security products are needed to isolate and control incoming IP addresses.

• Third-party security plugins must be manually installed for authentication and authorization.