What Milvus version to start with

This post details the three primary open-source Milvus deployment modes: Milvus Lite, Milvus Standalone, and Milvus Cluster. Milvus Lite is presented as a lightweight, single-binary option for local development and prototyping, integrating with Colab/Jupyter and offering core vector search features. Milvus Standalone is described as a single-instance mode suitable for smaller datasets and traffic, detailing its essential components (Milvus, etcd, MinIO). Milvus Cluster is explained as a distributed mode for large-scale, enterprise-grade workloads, outlining its eight microservice components and three third-party dependencies (etcd, MinIO, Pulsar). The post provides guidance on choosing the appropriate version based on dataset size, traffic volume, scalability, and production constraints, also mentioning Zilliz Cloud as a managed option.