What is Zilliz Cloud?

Zilliz Cloud is the fully managed, hosted version of Milvus, built and operated by Zilliz (Milvus's original creator), for teams that want Milvus's capabilities without operating the underlying infrastructure themselves.

It's offered in multiple deployment models to fit different operational preferences: a Serverless tier that scales automatically and bills by usage, a Dedicated tier providing reserved, isolated cluster resources, and a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option that runs the managed service inside a customer's own cloud account for organizations with stricter data residency or network isolation requirements.

Because Zilliz Cloud is built on the same open-source Milvus engine, applications aren't locked into the managed service specifically; workloads can generally move between self-hosted open-source Milvus and Zilliz Cloud, which is a meaningful consideration for teams weighing operational convenience against wanting to avoid vendor lock-in.