What is the difference between Milvus standalone and distributed deployment?

Milvus standalone runs all components in a single process, simple to set up and suitable for development or small production workloads up to a few million vectors. Milvus distributed separates the access layer, coordinators, workers, and storage into independent services, enabling horizontal scaling to billions of vectors and high query throughput. Distributed deployment requires Kubernetes for orchestration plus external dependencies like etcd, object storage, and a message broker. Choose standalone for quick starts and distributed for serious production scale.