Milvus

Milvus is a purpose-built vector database designed for managing and searching massive quantities of unstructured data through embedding vectors. Architecturally, Milvus 2.x and its 2026 iterations utilize a cloud-native, disaggregated storage and compute design, allowing for independent scaling of query nodes, data nodes, and index nodes. This modularity ensures high availability and horizontal scalability, making it the industry standard for enterprise-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and recommender systems. By 2026, Milvus has solidified its market position by integrating advanced hybrid search capabilities, combining scalar filtering with high-speed vector indexing like HNSW, DiskANN, and GPU-accelerated IVF-Flat. It supports a wide array of distance metrics including Euclidean, Inner Product, and Cosine Similarity. The ecosystem includes Zilliz Cloud for managed services, providing a seamless transition from local development to global production. With its ability to handle trillions of vectors with millisecond latency, Milvus remains the go-to solution for Fortune 500 companies building multimodal AI applications, bridging the gap between raw data and actionable semantic insights.