Cloud-native applications usually use cloud-native storage, usually a combination of databases and object storage. Some of the agility of cloud-native application development comes from separating the persistence (storage) from the compute. Applications can be rapidly developed using DevOps methodologies while the valuable persistent data remains in the storage services. But what about the portability of those storage services? If you are not all-in with one cloud, you might want a persistence layer that you can use across clouds and on-premises. This is the challenge with multi-cloud, each cloud has its own standard services, and there is little interoperability between those standard services because each cloud provider wants to host all your IT.
MinIO can help you with multi-cloud object storage, providing S3 compatible storage anywhere you run a Kubernetes cluster, on-premises, or on almost any public cloud platform. The S3 compatibility is not simply about the API to access objects. MinIO has S3 features such as Lifecycle policies, versioning, object lock, and replication. MinIO can replicate buckets and objects from cloud-based MinIO buckets to on-premises or other cloud locations. Object storage tends to suit asynchronous replication; most of the time, objects are written once and read many (WORM) times, although MinIO offers synchronous replication for different use-cases. All your MinIO clusters are managed through a centralized console and API.
MinIO does not provide object storage with the lowest cost per GB. The focus is on performance and solving data management problems for large consumers of object storage. I saw MinIO present at Tech Field Day 25 and earlier at Cloud Field Day 11. At last year’s Cloud Field Day, MinIO also talked about having an interface for RocksDB, which multiple types of database engines can use. Using the same underlying platform for both unstructured data (S3) and structured data (RocksDB) might allow a unified persistence tier to enable multi-cloud deployment of cloud-native applications.
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