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Vald Architecture

This document describes the high-level architecture design of Vald and explains each component in Vald.

Overview

Vald uses a cloud-native architecture focusing on Kubernetes. Some components in Vald use Kubernetes API to control the behavior of distributed vector indexes. Before reading this document, you need to have some understanding of the basic idea of cloud-native architecture and Kubernetes.

Technologies used by Vald

Vald is based on the following technologies.

  • Kubernetes

    To easily scale and manage Vald, it is used by deploying and running on Kubernetes. Vald takes all of the advantages of using Kubernetes. For more details please read the next section.

  • Helm

    Helm helps you to deploy and configure Vald. Vald contains multiple components and configurations. Helm helps us to manage those manifests and provides a better and easy way to deploy and configure Vald.

  • NGT

    NGT is one of the core components of Vald. NGT is a super-fast vector search engine used by Vald to guarantee the high performance of Vald.

Concept

Here are the concepts of Vald.

  • Microservice based

    Vald is designed based on the microservice architecture. Vald components are highly decoupled into small components and connected, which increases the overall agility and maintainability of Vald.

  • Containerized

    All components in Vald are containerized, which means you can easily deploy Vald components in any environment.

  • Observability & Real-time monitoring

    All Vald components support Cloud-Native based observability features such as Prometheus and Jaeger exporter.

  • Distributed vector spaces

    All the vector data and indexes are distributed to Vald Agents in the Vald cluster. Whenever you search a vector in Vald cluster, all Vald agents can process parallelly and merge the result by Vald LB Gateway.

  • Kubernetes based

    Vald can integrate with Kubernetes which enables the following features.

    • Orchestrated

      Kubernetes supports container orchestration. All components in Vald can be managed by Kubernetes automatically.

    • Horizontal scalable

      All Vald components are designed and implemented to be scalable. You can add any node in the Kubernetes cluster at any time to scale your Kubernetes cluster or change the number of replicas to scale Vald.

    • Auto-healing

      Kubernetes supports the auto-healing feature. The pod can start a new instance automatically whenever the pod is down.

    • Data persistency

      Vald implements backup features. Whenever a Vald Agent is down, and Kubernetes start a new Vald Agent instance, the data is automatically restored to the new instance to prevent data loss.

    • Easy to manage

      Vald can be deployed easily on your Kubernetes cluster by using Helm charts. The custom resources and custom controllers are useful to manage your Vald cluster.

Basic Architecture

Vald is based on microservice architecture, which means Vald is composited by multiple components, you can deploy part of the components to your cluster depending on your needs. In this section, we will introduce the basic architecture of Vald.

We will introduce each component and why it is needed in Vald.

Vald Agent

Vald Agent is the core component of Vald, the approximate nearest neighbor search engine, and stores the graph tree construction on memory for indexing the vectors. Vald Agent uses yahoojapan/NGT as a core library.

Vald LB Gateway

Vald LB Gateway is a gateway to load balance the user request and forward user request to the Vald Agent based on the resource usage of the Vald Agent and the corresponding cluster node. In addition, it summarizes the search results from each Vald Agent and returns the final search result to the client.

Vald Discoverer

Vald Discoverer provides Vald Agent discovery service to discover active Vald Agent pods in the Kubernetes cluster. It also retrieves the corresponding Vald Agent resource usage including pod and node resource usage for Vald LB gateway to determine the priority of which Vald Agent handles the user request.

Vald Index Manager

Vald Index Manager controls the timing of the indexing of the Vald Agent. Since the search operation will no work during the Vald Agent index operation is running, thanks to controlling the timing of indexing by Vald Index Manager, index operation of Vald Agent can be triggered and controlled by Vald Index Manager intelligently.

It retrieves the active Vald Agent pods from the Vald Discoverer and triggers the indexing action on each Vald Agent.