Perimattic Managed Milvus - Vector Database on AWS

This AMI runs Milvus standalone, the open-source vector database for similarity search and AI applications, on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The official Milvus container image (milvusdb/milvus, version 3.0.5) is pinned and baked into the AMI together with the two services Milvus's own standalone Docker setup uses: etcd (v3.5.25) for metadata and MinIO (RELEASE.2024-12-18T13-15-44Z) for object storage. Nothing is pulled from a registry at first start. Milvus is an independent open-source project and Perimattic is not affiliated with it; product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Why Milvus?

Milvus stores vector embeddings with their fields and searches them by similarity, with filtering, for semantic search, recommendations and retrieval-augmented generation. It has REST and gRPC APIs and SDKs such as pymilvus.

What Perimattic adds

Secure by default: Milvus ships with authorization switched off and a built-in root password, and its bundled MinIO ships with the keys minioadmin/minioadmin. On this AMI authorization is on from the very first start, and the root password and the MinIO keys are generated on your server at first login. Setup checks that an unauthenticated REST or gRPC request, the default root password and the default MinIO keys are all refused, and that the generated credentials can create a collection, insert, search and drop it, before anything is published. There are no default or shared credentials in the image.

HTTPS: Apache is the reverse proxy, with a free Let's Encrypt certificate requested for your domain by certbot. It publishes only the REST API (paths under /v1 and /v2), and every request there needs the token root:.

What is and is not exposed

gRPC, the protocol pymilvus and most SDKs use, is not published to the internet: it listens on 127.0.0.1 only, so use an SSH tunnel (ssh -L 19530:127.0.0.1:19530). Milvus's management port (9091: metrics, debug and web console) also listens on 127.0.0.1 only and is never proxied. etcd and MinIO are reachable only inside the Docker network. Only ports 22, 80 and 443 are open.

Sizing

Milvus, etcd and MinIO used about 0.3 GB of memory when empty and about 0.4 GB with a loaded collection of 20,000 128-dimension vectors in our tests. Memory grows with your data (roughly 4 bytes per dimension per vector plus index overhead when held in memory). A t3.medium (4 GB) is the recommended starting size; size up with your data. The data is on the instance's root volume, so choose its size for your data. Milvus's own compose file runs Milvus with Docker's seccomp filter off; this image keeps the default filter on, which is enough for in-memory indexes (disk-based DiskANN indexes may need it relaxed).

Licences

Milvus and etcd are released under the Apache License 2.0. MinIO is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL-3.0); it is the unmodified upstream build, used internally by Milvus (source: github.com/minio/minio, release tag RELEASE.2024-12-18T13-15-44Z).

Getting Started Launch the AMI and open ports 22, 80 and 443 in the security group SSH in and answer the setup prompts (domain and admin email) Copy the root password printed at the end of setup Call https://your-domain/v2/vectordb/collections/list  with the header Authorization: Bearer root:

A domain name with an A record pointing at the instance is required, because the REST API is served over HTTPS.

Book a free setup consultation at https://cal.com/gaurav-pareek-perimattic/marketplace-setup-consultations  or email us at aws-support@perimattic.com .

Support Managed and supported by Perimattic, a cloud infrastructure company with 13+ years of experience serving global clients. We offer free setup assistance, custom integrations, infrastructure consulting, and 24/7 support.