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

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Milvus

Self-managed Milvus on ECS

Resource costs

• You can create an Milvus instance with a single click without incurring extra costs for components such as Kafka and etcd.

• Supports Auto Scaling, which lets you flexibly change node specifications and the number of nodes.

• You must purchase ECS instances and components, such as Kafka and etcd. Technical experts are required to manually build and maintain the Kubernetes environment.

• You may face capacity constraints or provisioning delays for ECS instances during peak demand. Idle resources during off-peak hours can lead to waste.

Network fees

• Data transfer over the internal network within the same region is free.

• Milvus provides free Internet access. Service interconnection across different regions over the Internet does not incur traffic charges.

• Data transfer over the internal network within the same region is free.

• For data transfer across different regions over the Internet, you must pay for Internet traffic. For more information, see Public bandwidth billing.

Labor/Time

• Milvus is a fully managed service. It is ready to use and follows a pay-as-you-go billing method.

• Provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for cluster operations and maintenance (O&M) and management, which significantly reduces O&M costs.

• You must purchase instances and manually build a Milvus cluster. This process leads to slow iterations and high time costs.

• You are responsible for managing resources and performing cluster O&M yourself. This requires a professional team of Milvus engineers and results in high labor costs.

Risk costs

The Alibaba Cloud service guarantees 99.9% service reliability with very low IT risks. Risks to upper-layer services are also controllable.

A self-managed Milvus cluster has no minimum guarantee. It requires strong technical skills and high investment to reduce business risks.

After-sales costs

Alibaba Cloud provides after-sales technical support.

No after-sales technical support team is available. You must troubleshoot issues on your own.

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Milvus

Self-managed Milvus on ECS

Ease of use

• Ready to use and supports elastic scaling. You can flexibly adjust cluster configurations with a single click.

• Supports one-click cluster version upgrades.

• The console provides over 100 metrics. You can customize alert rules and use the alert service.

• Deployment operations are complex. You must manually adjust resources.

• You must ensure the stability of the cluster kernel version and the upgrade process yourself.

• O&M is difficult. You must use commands to check the health status of clusters, nodes, and indexes.

• Provides only basic monitoring capabilities. Exposing complex metrics requires custom development or integration with third-party monitoring tools.

Scenario capability support

• Retrieval capabilities: Optimized retrieval for Sparse and Binary data types. Performance is several times higher than the open source version.

• AI scenario capabilities: Seamlessly compatible with frameworks such as LangChain and LlamaIndex. Integrates with the Alibaba Cloud AI product matrix, including Platform for AI (PAI)-EAS and Tongyi, to help you build cloud-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions with one click.

You must develop these capabilities yourself or integrate open source solutions.

Performance

Provides enhanced capabilities, such as advanced ANN and sparse query algorithms, to significantly boost performance for various operations, including cluster read/write operations and vector search.

You are responsible for ensuring performance. The technical implementation is difficult.

Availability

• Achieves 99.9% data and service reliability.

• Provides visual data management. Component services have multiple replicas for high availability (HA).

• You are responsible for backing up data and ensuring cluster availability.

• Disaster recovery deployments are technically difficult to implement.

• You must use APIs to manually build and maintain the cluster.

Security

• Supports encrypted data transfer over HTTP and encrypted data storage.

• By default, clusters are accessed within a virtual private cloud (VPC) environment. Provides cluster access policies based on Resource Access Management (RAM).

• The data storage system provides multi-AZ redundancy within the same region to ensure normal access to business data.

• Security is handled through a multi-layered approach, combining Resource Access Management (RAM) for service-level access with Milvus's built-in Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for fine-grained permissions.

• Provides only basic ECS security. Cluster security risks are high.

• You must purchase cloud security products to control access from IP addresses.

• You must manually install third-party security plug-ins for authentication and authorization.