Running a more powerful retrieval engine in production

Milvus has expanded beyond vector search into a more powerful retrieval engine—combining vector, full-text, and structured search over data stored in open lake formats.

Milvus 3.0 brings more of the retrieval workflow into one engine while allowing data to remain in formats such as Parquet, Lance, Iceberg, and Vortex—without maintaining another serving copy.

Join Milvus maintainers, AWS architects, and engineers working on retrieval at scale for a practical look at the new architecture, its tradeoffs, and what it changes in production.

What we’ll cover

  • Vector, full-text, and structured search in one retrieval engine

  • Searching lake-resident data without another serving copy

  • When to use External Collections versus native Milvus collections

  • Using snapshots and batch workflows for evaluation and re-embedding

Agenda

17:30 — Check-in. Food and drinks.

18:00 — Opening: AWS welcome + Milvus community intro

18:30

  • Talk: Milvus 3.0: A More Powerful Retrieval Engine

  • Speaker: Jiang Chen, Head of Developer Relations and Solutions, Milvus/Zilliz

  • Outline:- Engineers maintaining a data lake and retrieval system faces a challenge: either copy lake-resident embeddings into a separate serving system, or search the lake directly and accept brute-force scans and impractical latency. Milvus 3.0 introduces a third path. With lake-native External Collections, Milvus can build index thus efficiently serve searches on vector, full-text, JSON, and scalar data over lake files on object storage. Milvus 3.0 also enhances the retrieval engine in sorting, aggregation, faceted search, nested documents. This talk will share the architectural change that makes this possible, as well as new features in full-text search and more flexible data modeling.

19:00 — Talk, from 6Sense

19:30 — Break

19:40 — Talk, from an Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineer

20:10 — Panel and open Q&A with all speakers

20:30 — Networking

21:00 — Close

Who this is for

  • Search, ML infrastructure, and data platform engineers

  • AI architects, startup CTOs, and founding engineers

  • Teams building or evaluating production retrieval systems

A technical evening focused on modern architectures, production operations, and real-world tradeoffs. Bring hard questions, please.

Before you come

Registration closes 14 October and late registrations cannot be admitted — reception works from a list submitted three business days ahead, and anyone not on it will not get into the building. Please bring photo ID. Check-in is two stages. Detailed entrance directions go out by email once your registration is confirmed.