The main developer of the MinIO cloud storage stack is MinIO, Inc, a Silicon Valley-based technology startup, founded by Anand Babu “AB” Periasamy, Garima Kapoor, and Harshavardhana in November 2014. The sourcecode for the Go project is hosted on GitHub, where it had more than 250M downloads and over 22,000 stars as of June 2020. Contributions to the project are accepted via GitHub's implementation of pull requests.
MinIO cloud storage stack has three major components, the cloudstorage server, MinIO Client, also known as mc, which is a desktop client for file management with Amazon S3 compatible servers and the MinIO SDKs that can be used by applications to interact with an Amazon S3 compatible server.
MinIO Server
MinIO cloud storage server is designed to be minimal and scalable. It is light enough to be bundled along with the application stack, similar to NodeJS and Redis. It can store unstructured data such as photos, videos, container/VM images, log files, and archives. Designed for high-performance, peta-scale workloads, MinIO offers a suite of features that are specific to large enterprise deployments. These include erasure coding, bitrot protection, encryption/WORM, identity management, continuous replication, global federation, and support for multi-cloud deployments via gateway mode.
Deployment
MinIO server is hardware agnostic and works on a variety of physical and virtual/container environments. This allows it to run in containers running on commodity servers with local disks, and still have enterprise-level data safety and scalability. MinIO server can be installed on physical or virtual machines or launched as Docker containers and deployed on container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Mesosphere, and Docker Swarm.
MinIO Client
The MinIO Client provides an alternative to standard UNIX commands, adding support for Amazon S3-compatible cloud storage services. MinIO Client is supported on Linux, Mac and Windows platforms.
MinIO has published a number of benchmarks to document both its performance and the performance of object storage in general. Those include comparisons to Amazon S3 for Presto and Spark as well as throughput results for the S3Benchmark on HDD and NVMe drives.
Licensing
MinIO is 100% open source under the Apache V2 license. The licensing model has led to several companies incorporating MinIO as their object storage layers including Nutanix Buckets and Qumulo.
