What is Milvus and what problems does it solve?

Milvus is an open-source, cloud-native vector database designed for large-scale similarity search, maintained by Zilliz and a CNCF graduated project. It separates storage from compute, scales horizontally to billions of vectors, and supports multiple index types including HNSW, IVF, DiskANN, and GPU-accelerated indexes. Milvus targets production workloads in recommendation, image retrieval, semantic search, and RAG where query volume and data size exceed what single-node databases can handle. It is the underlying engine of the Zilliz Cloud managed service.