milvus

Chainguard Container for milvus

High-performance, cloud-native vector database built for scalable vector ANN search

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/milvus:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

This image is based on the official Milvus vector database and is compatible with the upstream milvusdb/milvus Docker images.

Prerequisites

To run Milvus, you'll need:

• Kubernetes cluster (for production deployments using Helm)
• Docker (for local standalone deployments)
• Dependencies (for production):
  • etcd: Metadata storage and service discovery
  • MinIO or S3: Object storage for vector data
  • Pulsar or Kafka: Message queue (optional for distributed mode)

For detailed system requirements, see the Milvus Installation Overview.

Getting Started

Standalone Deployment with Docker

For development and testing, you can run Milvus in standalone mode:

docker run -d \
  --name milvus-standalone \
  -p 19530:19530 \
  -p 9091:9091 \
  -v milvus-data:/var/lib/milvus/data \
  cgr.dev/chainguard/milvus:latest \
  milvus run standalone

This exposes:

• Port 19530: Milvus gRPC service (client connections)
• Port 9091: Metrics endpoint

Production Deployment with Helm

For production environments, use the official Milvus Helm chart with Chainguard images:

# Add Milvus Helm repository
helm repo add milvus https://zilliztech.github.io/milvus-helm/
helm repo update

# Create values file for Chainguard images
cat <<EOF > milvus-values.yaml
image:
  all:
    repository: cgr.dev/chainguard/milvus
    tag: latest
    pullPolicy: Always

# Configure storage and dependencies
cluster:
  enabled: true

etcd:
  enabled: true

minio:
  enabled: true

pulsar:
  enabled: true
EOF

# Install Milvus
helm install milvus milvus/milvus \
  -n milvus \
  --create-namespace \
  -f milvus-values.yaml

Verifying the Deployment

Once Milvus is running, verify connectivity using the Python SDK:

apk add py3-pymilvus

python3 <<'PYTHON'
from pymilvus import connections, utility

# Connect to Milvus
connections.connect(host="localhost", port=19530)

# Check server version
print(f"Milvus version: {utility.get_server_version()}")

# Disconnect
connections.disconnect("default")
PYTHON

Basic Usage Example

Create a collection and insert some vectors

from pymilvus import connections, Collection, FieldSchema, CollectionSchema, DataType

# Connect to Milvus
connections.connect(host="localhost", port=19530)

# Define collection schema
fields = [
    FieldSchema(name="id", dtype=DataType.INT64, is_primary=True, auto_id=True),
    FieldSchema(name="embedding", dtype=DataType.FLOAT_VECTOR, dim=128)
]
schema = CollectionSchema(fields=fields, description="Product embeddings")

# Create collection
collection = Collection(name="products", schema=schema)

# Insert vectors
import random
embeddings = [[random.random() for _ in range(128)] for _ in range(1000)]
collection.insert([embeddings])
collection.flush()

Configuration

Configuration File Approach

See upstream for an example.

Create a milvus.yaml configuration file:

# Storage configuration
common:
  storagePath: /var/lib/milvus/data

queryNode:
  cacheSize: 8GB

  # Enable GPU acceleration (if available)
  enableGPU: true

# Metrics and monitoring
metrics:
  enabled: true
  port: 9091

# Security configuration
common:
  security:
    tlsEnabled: true

Mount the configuration file when running the container:

docker run -d \
  --name milvus-standalone \
  -p 19530:19530 \
  -v $(pwd)/milvus.yaml:/milvus/configs/milvus.yaml:ro \
  -v milvus-data:/var/lib/milvus/data \
  cgr.dev/chainguard/milvus:latest \
  milvus run standalone --config-file /milvus/configs/milvus.yaml

Environment Variables Approach

For Kubernetes deployments, configure via Helm values:

queryNode:
  replicas: 3
  resources:
    limits:
      memory: 16Gi
      cpu: 4
    requests:
      memory: 8Gi
      cpu: 2

indexNode:
  replicas: 2
  resources:
    limits:
      memory: 8Gi
      cpu: 2

For detailed configuration options, refer to the Milvus Configuration Guide.

Documentation and Resources

• Official Milvus Documentation
• Milvus GitHub Repository
• Milvus Helm Chart
• PyMilvus Python SDK
• Milvus Use Cases and Applications

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.