Our Journey to 35K+ GitHub Stars: The Real Story of Building Milvus from Scratch

Milvus, a vector database developed by Zilliz, achieved over 35,000 stars on GitHub, marking its significance in the AI infrastructure landscape. Founded in 2017 to address the inefficiencies of traditional databases in handling high-dimensional vectors, Milvus emerged as a unique solution for storing and searching vector embeddings crucial for AI applications. The journey involved open-sourcing in 2019, joining the LF AI & Data Foundation in 2020, and a significant rewrite leading to Milvus 2.0 in 2022 to enhance scalability and cloud-native architecture. The growing demand for vector databases, accelerated by the rise of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in 2023, spurred the creation of Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed service addressing enterprise needs while maintaining Milvus as an open-source project. Zilliz's efforts are validated by its adoption by major enterprises like Bosch and Read AI, demonstrating Milvus's impact in reducing costs and improving data retrieval efficiency. Looking ahead, Zilliz plans to develop a Vector Data Lake to offer cost-effective solutions for massive, infrequent vector searches, continuing to innovate in AI-native infrastructure.