With over 45,000 GitHub stars and 100 million Docker pulls, Milvus is the most widely adopted open-source vector database, powering production AI systems at NVIDIA, Salesforce, eBay, Airbnb, and DoorDash. The distributed architecture separates compute and storage with stateless microservices on Kubernetes, horizontally scaling query nodes for read-heavy workloads and data nodes for write-heavy ingestion independently. Milvus 3.0 introduces lake-native retrieval that builds and serves indexes directly over vector data in object storage and open formats including Parquet, Lance, Iceberg, and Vortex without maintaining separate copies. Native hybrid search unifies lexical BM25 full-text retrieval and semantic vector search in a single engine with metadata filtering, eliminating the need for separate search infrastructure. Hardware-accelerated ANN indexing supports IVF, HNSW, DiskANN, and GPU-based indexes with BitQ 1-bit quantization cutting memory usage by 72 percent. SDKs for Python, Go, Node.js, and Java provide programmatic access, while Milvus Lite offers lightweight embedding for local development via pip install. Server-side aggregation, sorting, faceted search, StructArray for nested document structures, and ColBERT multi-vector scoring move ranking and result processing into the engine. The Path Index enables 100x faster JSON filtering with support for 100,000+ collections per cluster for multi-tenant deployments. Self-hosting deploys via Docker Standalone or Kubernetes with Helm charts using S3-compatible, GCS, or Azure Blob storage backends. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.