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Database / Milvus Vector database Interview questions

What is the difference between the Coordinator services and Worker nodes in Milvus's architecture?

Coordinator services (RootCoord, DataCoord, QueryCoord, IndexCoord) manage cluster state and orchestrate operations, deciding what should happen and where, but they don't process the actual vector data themselves. Worker nodes (QueryNode, DataNode, IndexNode) are the components that do the real data processing work the coordinators assign to them.

Coordinator servicesWorker nodes
Manage metadata, scheduling, and cluster orchestration.Perform actual data processing: search, ingest, index build.
Don't hold or process vector data directly.Directly load, hold, and process vector data.
Relatively lightweight in resource footprint.Resource-intensive; scale with data volume and query load.

This coordinator/worker split is a common pattern in distributed systems generally: it keeps decision-making (which segment goes where, which node should build which index) centralized and consistent, while the actual heavy-lifting data processing is spread across a horizontally scalable fleet of worker nodes that don't need to coordinate directly with each other, only with their designated coordinator.

Coordinator services in Milvus are best described as:
Worker nodes, compared to coordinator services, are generally:

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