What is the architecture of Milvus?

Milvus follows a cloud-native architecture with four layers: access, coordinator, worker, and storage. The access layer handles client requests through a proxy. Coordinators manage cluster metadata, data placement, and scheduling. Workers handle data ingest, indexing, and query execution. Storage includes object storage like S3 for vectors, a log broker like Kafka or Pulsar for streaming writes, and a metadata store like etcd. This separation lets each component scale independently and gives Milvus its signature ability to handle billion-vector deployments.