7 Years, 2 Rebuilds, 40K+ Stars: Milvus Recap and Roadmap

Summary

In June 2025, Milvus reached 35,000 GitHub stars. Fast-forward just a few months, and we’ve now crossed 40,000—proof not only of momentum but of a global community that keeps pushing the future of vector and multimodal search forward. We’re profoundly grateful. To everyone who starred, forked, filed issues, argued over an API, shared a benchmark, or built something incredible with Milvus: Thank you, and you’re the reason this project moves as fast as it does. Every star represents more than a button pressed — it reflects someone choosing Milvus to power their work, someone who believes in what we’re building, someone who shares our vision for open, accessible, high-performance AI infrastructure. So as we celebrate, we’re also looking ahead—to the features you’re asking for, to the architectures AI now demands, and to a world where multimodal, semantic understanding is the default in every application. When we started building Milvus in 2017, the term vector database didn’t even exist. We were just a small team of engineers convinced that AI applications would soon need a new kind of data infrastructure—one built not for rows and columns, but for high-dimensional, unstructured, multimodal data. Traditional databases weren’t built for that world, and we knew someone had to reimagine what storage and retrieval could look like. The early days were far from glamorous. Building enterprise-grade infrastructure is slow, stubborn work—weeks spent profiling code paths, rewriting components, and questioning design choices at 2 a.m. But we held onto a simple mission: make vector search accessible, scalable, and reliable for every developer building AI applications. That mission carried us through the first breakthroughs and through the inevitable setbacks. And along the way, a few turning points changed everything: 2019: We open-sourced Milvus 0.10. It meant exposing all our rough edges—the hacks, the TODOs, the pieces we weren’t yet proud of. But the community showed up. Devel...