Zilliz Announces General Availability of Milvus 2.6.x on Zilliz Cloud, Powering Billion-Scale Vector Search at Even Lower Cost

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Jan. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Zilliz, the company behind the leading open-source vector database Milvus, recently announced the General Availability (GA) of Milvus 2.6.x on Zilliz Cloud. This major update not only brings the architectural breakthroughs of the latest Milvus release to a fully managed environment but also introduces a series of cloud-only optimizations, offering developers and enterprises a streamlined path to building production-grade Generative AI applications with significantly reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

As organizations transition AI projects from prototypes to large-scale production, infrastructure costs and operational complexity have become critical bottlenecks. Milvus 2.6.x on Zilliz Cloud addresses these challenges head-on by combining the power of the core vector engine with the elasticity and ease of use of a cloud-native platform.

"The next phase of AI adoption requires infrastructure that is not only fast but also economically viable at scale," said James Luan, VP of Engineering at Zilliz. "With the launch of Milvus 2.6.x on our fully managed, production-ready service, we are democratizing access to high-performance vector search. We have engineered this release to ensure that your engineering teams focus on innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance."

Key Capabilities of Milvus 2.6.x on Zilliz Cloud

Three-Layer Tiered Storage with Near-S3 Economics

 Zilliz Cloud introduces a cloud-native multi-layer storage architecture that automatically places data across memory, local SSD, and object storage based on access patterns. Hot data stays fast, cold data stays cheap—delivering over 90% cache hit rates in production and up to 87% lower storage costs with reduced compute overhead.

Index Build Level for Cost-Aware Accuracy Control

Zilliz Cloud adds Index Build Level, allowing teams to automatically balance recall, performance, and storage efficiency. Workloads can prioritize precision, choose a balanced profile, or optimize for capacity, while a built-in quantization engine manages index compression without manual tuning.

High-Performance Metadata Filtering for AI Workloads

With JSON Shredding and JSON Path indexing, Milvus 2.6.x on Zilliz Cloud accelerates metadata filtering by up to 100×. This enables fast, structured filtering alongside vector search in a single system—critical for RAG pipelines, recommendations, and multi-tenant applications.

Hybrid BM25-optimized Full-Text and Vector Search

Zilliz Cloud now delivers even more enhanced full-text search, offering up to 7× faster performance than Elasticsearch on selected datasets and significantly smaller indexes. This unifies keyword and semantic retrieval while simplifying production architectures.

Expanded Data Types and Multilingual Retrieval for More AI Use Cases

Milvus 2.6.x on Zilliz Cloud adds native support for spatial data, timezone-aware timestamps, INT8 vectors, and nested structures, alongside improved multilingual tokenization and phrase search—enabling complex, global AI applications without external systems.

For a full list of Milvus 2.6.x features on Zilliz Cloud, check out the Milvus release notes.

Availability

Milvus 2.6.x is available immediately on Zilliz Cloud across all major cloud providers. New users can sign up for a free trial to experience the performance and cost benefits firsthand.

For more information, visit zilliz.com/cloud.

About Zilliz

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database. Zilliz Cloud brings that performance to production with a fully managed, cloud-native platform built for scalable, low-latency vector search and hybrid retrieval. It supports billion-scale workloads with sub-10ms latency, auto-scaling, and optimized indexes for GenAI use cases like semantic search and RAG.

Zilliz is built to make AI not just possible—but practical. With a focus on performance and cost-efficiency, it helps engineering teams move from prototype to production without overprovisioning or complex infrastructure. Over 10,000 organizations worldwide rely on Zilliz to build intelligent applications at scale.

Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, Zilliz is backed by leading investors including Aramco's Prosperity 7 Ventures, Temasek's Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital, Yunqi Partners, Trustbridge Partners, and others. Learn more at  Zilliz.com.

SOURCE Zilliz