Vector Retrieval Service for Milvus, or Milvus for short, is a fully managed vector search engine that and ensures full compatibility with open-source Milvus for seamless migration. Alibaba Cloud Vector Retrieval Service for Milvus is 100% compatible with open-source Milvus. This cloud-native, fully managed vector database supports large-scale vector storage and retrieval, covering embedding generation, vector data writes, vector indexing, vector computation, and vector management. It is an ideal choice for a variety of AI use cases, including multimodal search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), search and recommendation, and harmful content detection. It offers high availability and costs more than 30% less than an open-source deployment, with the goal of minimizing cost and maximizing performance to unlock the value of your data.
Background information
Milvus is a cloud-native, open-source vector search engine built on and optimized from libraries such as Faiss, Annoy, and HNSW. It provides high availability, high performance, and easy scalability for real-time recall of massive vector data. Milvus supports data partitioning, sharding, persistence, incremental data ingestion, hybrid queries, and time travel. It also provides intuitive APIs and multi-language SDKs for AI use cases such as recommendation systems, image retrieval, video analysis, and natural language processing.
Benefits
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Cloud-native, high-speed vector retrieval service
Integrates multiple vector search libraries and supports hybrid queries, enabling efficient and stable high-performance vector data retrieval.
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Enterprise-grade operations and maintenance and ease of use
A fully managed cloud service that greatly reduces cluster maintenance costs. It is out-of-the-box and includes built-in configuration management, security features, and on-demand node-based scaling powered by a cloud-native architecture for high performance and scalability. Comprehensive, visualized monitoring and alerting ensure system stability and efficient operations.
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Compatibility with the open-source Milvus ecosystem
Fully compatible with open-source Milvus, supporting management tools such as Attu and an active community ecosystem.
Features
Build an enterprise-grade, fully managed, and scalable AI vector database for similarity search
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High availability
Guarantees 99.9% availability through the Milvus operations platform.
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High scalability
Built on a serverless architecture, Milvus enables rapid horizontal and vertical cluster scaling.
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Open-source compatibility
100% compatible with open-source Milvus, providing the same native interaction experience and including the visualization tool Attu by default.
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High security
Deployed in an Alibaba Cloud virtual private cloud (VPC), the service provides VPC access, finer-grained access control, and a higher level of security protection.
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Instance observability
Provides comprehensive cluster metrics monitoring and alerting.
Capabilities and ecosystem integration beyond the open-source version
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Integration with Alibaba Cloud AI products
Works with Alibaba Cloud AI products such as Platform for AI (PAI) and Qwen to simplify enterprise AI application deployment.
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Integration with upstream and downstream Alibaba Cloud products
Connects with Alibaba Cloud storage and big data services, simplifying cross-product data access and streamlining data engineering for AI applications.
Billing
Milvus pricing consists of compute units (CUs) and storage. For detailed billing rules, see Billing items.