Know
When it comes to object stores, developers have winnowed the field to four players - the three major clouds and MinIO. Yes, there are other options, but those options are generally forced on the developer by legacy preference, corporate mandates or laziness.
Here are the things that developers value most about MinIO.
Developer-Centric
In the world of software development, accessibility is everything. MinIO’s open-source nature allows developers to access, modify, and enhance the system, tailoring it to fit their specific requirements. This is complemented by its simple deployment mechanism and API compatibility with Amazon S3, which developers find easy to work with. This means it can easily be incorporated into a wide variety of applications and tools that developers already use.
It is more than just open source, however MinIO is obsessed with the developer experience and creates optionality into its products. Where needed, MinIO will build in its own capabilities while retaining access to the entire cloud-native ecosystem. Take a look at this post to understand this obsession better and what we have done for Key Encryption and Management, Load Balancing, Identity and Access Management - even SDK.
We are developers and we think like them.
Opinionated
MinIO is kept opinionated, but not political. We do not believe in keeping legacy functionality that in the end results in a bad developer experience. The primary example of this is to remove NAS and other gateways. While we know this was a beloved feature for some, it provided a sub-par experience for many others, with limited functionality, and this felt incongruous with MinIO Server, which has been developed carefully and purposefully. We made the decision to pull off the bandaid and transition to a full-featured server for all configurations.
We do not believe in adding options for the sake of adding them. More options are rarely better. Instead we will attempt to cover these cases with different code paths and select the optimal path when feasible. We add options when there is a genuine need for them, instead of when we cannot easily determine the optimal value.
We believe that keeping MinIO opinionated benefits everybody in the long run, making it easier to use and with fewer edge cases to take care of. This will make MinIO behave its best out of the box.
Performant
MinIO is renowned for its lightning-fast speed, ensuring smooth and efficient operations. Speed is not a vanity metric, it is a means to an end with the end being more workloads. That is why MinIO is the go to object store for analytics workloads, application workloads and AI/ML workloads and is the foundation for modern data lakes.
Lightweight
The MinIO binary is less than 100 MB. It can run locally on the developer laptop but can scale to power the datacenter - This allows a developer to begin a project with minimal investment, even running MinIO in a container, and when that project takes flight, it can move all the way to the cloud without modification or changes in performance.
Flexible
MinIO’s commitment to supporting multiple data types, from unstructured data like logs and images to semi-structured and structured data, appeals to the multi-faceted needs of versatile developers. With MinIO, there are no constraints. We allow developers to manipulate and handle different data types efficiently, making it a flexible and practical tool for diverse development tasks.
We support every open data standard and our work on open table format (Delta, Apache Iceberg and Hudi), is considered required reading by most developers.
MinIO’s object transforms allow developers to create handlers using their preferred programming language, allowing objects stored in one format to be streamed in any format required.
Scalable
MinIO allows developers to scale their storage infrastructure without having to be storage or infrastructure experts. It can seamlessly manage terabytes or petabytes of data, making it perfect for developers working on applications built for scale. Unlike SAN/NAS solutions that hit a wall at a few PBs, MinIO delivers the rare combination of performance at scale for whatever your application requires. It is why the world’s largest streamer and largest online payment processor run their businesses on MinIO.
MinIO’s distributed architecture ensures that data stored on MinIO can be scaled across multiple drives (and drive types), servers, data centers, and even geographical regions. This scalability becomes vital when applications need to handle peak loads and vast amounts of data.
Robust
In an era where data breaches are increasingly common, security is a priority for developers. MinIO is designed with robust security features that include encrypted data communication, robust access policies, and support for Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategies.
These features are designed around developers so they can build and connect secure applications and guarantee the safety of their data.
Documented
In the realm of software development, robust documentation can be the difference between a product loved or loathed by developers. MinIO is loved. Developers use MinIO’s SDKs in place of those from AWS. That speaks volumes about our commitment to documentation.
MinIO excels in providing clear, comprehensive documentation, making it easy for developers to understand and implement its functionalities. Additionally, MinIO’s active community of developers and contributors is a testament to its popularity. This community offers valuable resources and problem-solving perspectives that are incredibly helpful for developers.
S3 Compatible
Not all S3 compatibility is the same - many object storage vendors support a small fraction of overall functionality - and this causes applications to fail. Others claim comprehensive coverage but their proprietary software or appliance models limit that claim considerably as a small fraction of applications, hardware and software are tested.
MinIO is unique in its ability to support its claim of S3 compatibility. With tens of thousands of customers and open source users, our S3 API compatibility is the most widely tested and implemented in the world - covering millions of combinations of hardware, software and applications. MinIO releases software weekly and any shortcoming to the S3 API is immediately reported by the community and rectified by MinIO.
Rumor has it that even Amazon tests third party S3 compatibility using MinIO.
Community Oriented
Developers appreciate community, and, in particular, active ones. MinIO has more than 24K members on its General Slack community. MinIO has more than 36K GitHub stars and has logged more than 17K pull requests.
We have more than 10K developers rocking the famous MinIO t-shirt.
We staff all of these channels with the engineers that wrote the code. Granted, if you have an SLA requirement, you will need a commercial license, but we are there each and every day alongside some remarkably helpful members of the community.
Finally, as a 100% open source offering developers have transparency into MinIO’s development which includes the ability to participate in the ongoing improvement process through GitHub issues.
