Build Efficient Multimodal Text‑Image Search with Alibaba Cloud Milvus

Solution Overview

With the rapid growth of unstructured data such as images, text, and video, traditional keyword search can no longer meet enterprise requirements for efficiency, precision, and scalability. This solution leverages Alibaba Cloud Milvus, a fully managed vector search engine, to enable fast, accurate multimodal retrieval for e‑commerce, government, media, legal, medical and other typical scenarios.

Advantages

Ready‑to‑use : Fully managed service that can be launched in minutes, supports elastic scaling and smooth version upgrades, and provides over 100 monitoring metrics with customizable alerts.

High performance : Optimized kernels and configurations deliver stronger ANN and sparse‑query algorithms, improving read/write and vector search throughput.

High availability : Multi‑replica components and data ensure 99.9% reliability with visual management tools.

Native security : Supports HTTP encryption, data‑at‑rest encryption, VPC isolation, RAM access control, and RBAC for multi‑layer protection.

Architecture

The architecture combines Milvus with Alibaba Cloud Baidu (百炼) multimodal model services. The system is deployed on the Serverless AI platform Function AI, which runs the model as a Function Compute service, providing one‑click deployment, automatic scaling, and fully managed operations.

Deployment Steps

1. Create Cloud Resources

Obtain a Baidu API‑KEY from the Baidu model service console.

Create a VPC and subnet in the desired region (e.g., East China 1 Hangzhou).

Provision a Milvus instance in the same region, configure public network access, and create a database (e.g., test_db).

Create a collection (e.g., test_collection) to store vector data.

2. Deploy the Application

Open the Function AI project template, configure parameters (use defaults where possible), and deploy the project (takes 3–5 minutes).

After deployment, locate the access URL from the project details page.

3. Verify the Solution

Open the Function AI project list, select the deployed project, and navigate to its details page.

Use the provided demo application to upload a single image or batch import data.

Search by entering a text query (e.g., 芒果) and setting the result count to 3, then click the search button to view results.

4. Clean Up Resources

To avoid ongoing costs, delete the Function AI project, the Baidu API‑KEY, the Milvus instance, the associated security group, subnet, and VPC.