Deploy MinIO Operator on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Overview
Amazon® Elastic Kubernetes Service® (EKS) is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge deployments.
The MinIO Kubernetes Operator supports deploying MinIO Tenants onto EKS infrastructure using the MinIO Operator Console, using the kubectl minio
CLI tool, or by using kustomize for YAML-defined deployments.
MinIO supports the following methods for installing the MinIO Operator onto your EKS clusters:
- Through the AWS Marketplace
MinIO maintains an AWS Marketplace listing through which you can register your EKS cluster with MinIO SUBNET. Any tenant you deploy through Marketplace-connected clusters can take advantage of SUBNET registration, including 24/7 direct access to MinIO engineers.
- Using the MinIO
kubectl
Plugin MinIO provides a
kubectl
plugin for installing and managing the MinIO Operator and Tenants through a terminal or shell (CLI) environment. You can manually register these tenants with MinIO SUBNET at any time.
This page documents deploying the MinIO Operator through the CLI using the kubectl minio
plugin.
For instructions on deploying the MinIO Operator through the AWS Marketplace, see Deploy MinIO through EKS
This documentation assumes familiarity with all referenced Kubernetes and Elastic Kubernetes Service concepts, utilities, and procedures. While this documentation may provide guidance for configuring or deploying Kubernetes-related or Elastic Kubernetes Service-related resources on a best-effort basis, it is not a replacement for the official Kubernetes Documentation.
Prerequisites
Existing EKS Cluster
This procedure assumes an existing EKS cluster onto which you can deploy the MinIO Operator.
The Operator by default deploys pods and services with two replicas each and pod anti-affinity. The GKE cluster should therefore have at least two nodes available for scheduling Operator pods and services. While these nodes may be the same nodes intended for use by MinIO Tenants, co-locating Operator and Tenant pods may increase the risk of service interruptions due to the loss of any one node.
kubectl
Access to the EKS Cluster
Ensure your host machine has a kubectl
installation compatible with the target EKS cluster.
For guidance on connecting kubectl
to EKS, see Creating or updating a kubeconfig file for an Amazon EKS cluster.
Your kubectl
configuration must include authentication as a user with the correct permissions.
MinIO provides an example IAM policy for Marketplace-based installations in the MinIO Operator github repository.
You can use this policy as a baseline for manual Operator installations.
Procedure
1) Install the MinIO Kubernetes Plugin
The MinIO Kubernetes Plugin provides a command for initializing the MinIO Operator.
You can install the MinIO plugin using either the Kubernetes Krew plugin manager or manually by downloading and installing the plugin binary to your local host:
Krew is a kubectl
plugin manager developed by the Kubernetes SIG CLI group.
See the krew
installation documentation for specific instructions.
You can use the Krew plugin for Linux, MacOS, and Windows operating systems.
You can use Krew to install the MinIO kubectl
plugin using the following commands:
kubectl krew update
kubectl krew install minio
If you want to update the MinIO plugin with Krew, use the following command:
kubectl krew upgrade minio
You can validate the installation of the MinIO plugin using the following command:
kubectl minio version
The output should match 5.0.9.
You can download the MinIO kubectl
plugin to your local system path.
The kubectl
CLI automatically discovers and runs compatible plugins.
The following code downloads the latest stable version 5.0.9 of the MinIO Kubernetes plugin and installs it to the system path:
curl https://github.com/minio/operator/releases/download/v5.0.9/kubectl-minio_5.0.9_linux_amd64 -o kubectl-minio
chmod +x kubectl-minio
mv kubectl-minio /usr/local/bin/
The mv
command above may require sudo
escalation depending on the permissions of the authenticated user.
Run the following command to verify installation of the plugin:
kubectl minio version
The output should display the Operator version as 5.0.9.
You can download the MinIO kubectl
plugin to your local system path.
The kubectl
CLI automatically discovers and runs compatible plugins.
The following PowerShell command downloads the latest stable version 5.0.9 of the MinIO Kubernetes plugin and installs it to the system path:
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://github.com/minio/operator/releases/download/v5.0.9/kubectl-minio_5.0.9_windows_amd64.exe" -OutFile "C:\kubectl-plugins\kubectl-minio.exe"
Ensure the path to the plugin folder is included in the Windows PATH.
Run the following command to verify installation of the plugin:
kubectl minio version
The output should display the Operator version as 5.0.9.
2) Initialize the MinIO Kubernetes Operator
Run the kubectl minio init
command to initialize the MinIO Operator:
kubectl minio init
The command initializes the MinIO Operator with the following default settings:
Deploy the Operator into the
minio-operator
namespace. Specify thekubectl minio init --namespace
argument to deploy the operator into a different namespace.Use
cluster.local
as the cluster domain when configuring the DNS hostname of the operator. Specify thekubectl minio init --cluster-domain
argument to set a different cluster domain value.
Important
Document all arguments used when initializing the MinIO Operator.
3) Validate the Operator Installation
To verify the installation, run the following command:
kubectl get all --namespace minio-operator
If you initialized the Operator with a custom namespace, replace
minio-operator
with that namespace.
The output resembles the following:
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
pod/console-59b769c486-cv7zv 1/1 Running 0 81m
pod/minio-operator-7976b4df5b-rsskl 1/1 Running 0 81m
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
service/console ClusterIP 10.105.218.94 <none> 9090/TCP,9443/TCP 81m
service/operator ClusterIP 10.110.113.146 <none> 4222/TCP,4233/TCP 81m
NAME READY UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE
deployment.apps/console 1/1 1 1 81m
deployment.apps/minio-operator 1/1 1 1 81m
NAME DESIRED CURRENT READY AGE
replicaset.apps/console-59b769c486 1 1 1 81m
replicaset.apps/minio-operator-7976b4df5b 1 1 1 81m
4) Open the Operator Console
Port Forwarding
Note
Some Kubernetes deployments may experience issues with timeouts during port-forwarding operations with the Operator Console. Select the NodePorts section to view instructions for alternative access. You can alternatively configure your preferred Ingress to grant access to the Operator Console service. See https://github.com/kubernetes/kubectl/issues/1368 for more information.
Run the kubectl minio proxy
command to temporarily forward traffic from the MinIO Operator Console service to your local machine:
kubectl minio proxy
The command output includes a required token for logging into the Operator Console.

You can deploy a new MinIO Tenant from the Operator Dashboard.
NodePorts
Use the following command to identify the NodePorts configured for the Operator Console.
If your local host does not have the jq
utility installed, you can run the first command and locate the spec.ports
section of the output.
kubectl get svc/console -n minio-operator -o json | jq -r '.spec.ports'
The output resembles the following:
[
{
"name": "http",
"nodePort": 31055,
"port": 9090,
"protocol": "TCP",
"targetPort": 9090
},
{
"name": "https",
"nodePort": 31388,
"port": 9443,
"protocol": "TCP",
"targetPort": 9443
}
]
Use the http
or https
port depending on whether you deployed the Operator with Console TLS enabled via kubectl minio init --console-tls
.
Append the nodePort
value to the externally-accessible IP address of a worker node in your Kubernetes cluster.
Use the following command to retrieve the JWT token necessary for logging into the Operator Console:
kubectl get secret/console-sa-secret -n minio-operator -o json | jq -r '.data.token' | base64 -d