Main Components

There are two modes for running Milvus: Standalone and Cluster. These two modes share the same features. You can choose a mode that best fits your dataset size, traffic data, and more. For now, Milvus standalone cannot be upgraded "online" to Milvus cluster.

Milvus standalone

Milvus standalone includes three components:

Milvus: The core functional component.
etcd: The metadata engine, which accesses and stores metadata of Milvus' internal components, including proxies, index nodes, and more.
MinIO: The storage engine, which is responsible for data persistence for Milvus.

Standalone_architecture — Milvus standalone architecture.

Milvus cluster

Milvus cluster includes eight microservice components and three third-party dependencies. All microservices can be deployed on Kubernetes, independently from each other.

Microservice components

Root coord
Proxy
Query coord
Query node
Index coord
Index node
Data coord
Data node

Third-party dependencies

etcd: Stores metadata for various components in the cluster.
MinIO: Responsible for data persistence of large files in the cluster, such as index and binary log files.
Pulsar: Manages logs of recent mutation operations, outputs streaming log, and provides log publish-subscribe services.

Distributed_architecture — Milvus cluster architecture.

What's next

Read Computing/Storage Disaggregation to understand the mechanism and design principle of Milvus.