Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 21.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

MinIO recently presented at Storage Field Day 21. You can see videos of the presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.

What Is It?

To quote the good folks at MinIO, it is a “high performance, Kubernetes-native object store”. It is designed to be used for large-scale data infrastructure, and was built from scratch to be cloud native.

[image courtesy of MinIO]

Design Principles

MinIO has been built with the following principles in mind:

• Cloud Native – born in the cloud with “cloud native DNA”
• Performance Focussed – believe it is the fastest object store in existence
• Simplicity – designed for simplicity because “simplicity scales”

S3 Compatibility

MinIO is heavily focussed on S3 compatibility. It was first to market with V4 and one of the few vendors to support S3 Select. It has also been strictly consistent from inception.

Put Me In Your Favourite Box

The cloud native part of MinIO was no accident, and as a result more than 62% of MinIO instances run in containers (according to MinIO). 43% of those instances are also managed via Kubernetes. It’s not just about jamming this solution into your favourite container solution though. The lightweight nature of it means you can deploy it pretty much anywhere. As the MinIO folks pointed out during the presentation, MinIO is going everywhere that AWS S3 isn’t.

Thoughts And Further Reading

I love object storage. Maybe not in the way I love my family or listening to records or beer, but I do love it. It’s not just useful for storage for the great unwashed of the Internet, but also backup and recovery, disaster recovery, data archives, and analytics. And I’m a big fan of MinIO, primarily because of the S3 compatibility and simplicity of deployment. Like it or not, S3 is the way forward in terms of a standard for object storage for cloud native (and a large number of enterprise) workloads. I’ve written before about other vendors being focussed on this compatibility, and I think it’s great that MinIO has approached this challenge with just as much vigour. There are plenty of problems to be had deploying applications at the best of times, and being able to rely on the storage vendor sticking to the script in terms of S3 compatibility takes one more potential headache away.

The simplicity of deployment is a big part of what intrigues me about MinIO too. I’m old enough to remember some deployments of early generation on-premises object storage systems that involved a bunch of hardware and complicated software interactions for what ultimately wasn’t a great experience. Something like MinIO can be up and running on some pretty tiny footprints in no time at all. A colleague of mine shared some insights into that process here.

And that’s what makes this cool. It’s not that MinIO are trying to take a piece of the AWS pie. Rather, it’s positioning the solution as one that can operate everywhere that the hyperscalers aren’t. Putting object storage solutions in edge locations has historically been a real pain to do. That’s no longer the case. Part of this has to do with the fact that we’ve got access to really small computers and compact storage. But it also has a bit to do with lightweight code that can be up and running in a snap. Like some of the other on-premises object vendors, MinIO has done a great job of turning people on to the possibility of doing cool storage for cloud native workloads outside of the cloud. It seems a bit odd until you think about all of the use cases in enterprise that might work really well in cloud, but aren’t allowed to be hosted in the cloud. It’s my opinion that MinIO has done a great job of filling that gap (and exceeding expectations) when it comes to lightweight, easy to deploy object storage. I’m looking forward to see what’s next for them, particularly as the other vendors start to leverage the solution. For another perspective on MinIO’s growth, check out Ray’s article here.