Milvus is an open-source vector database built for storing, indexing, and searching large collections of embedding vectors. It is designed for similarity search at scale and is commonly used in retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, recommendation systems, image or video search, anomaly detection, and other AI applications where content is represented as high-dimensional vectors.

Milvus supports multiple indexing strategies, metadata filtering, distributed deployments, and integrations with common AI frameworks and embedding pipelines. It can be deployed independently or used through managed services in the wider Zilliz ecosystem. For AI developers, Milvus acts as the retrieval infrastructure that connects embeddings to fast nearest-neighbor search, making it especially useful when datasets grow beyond what simple in-process vector stores can handle efficiently.