Show HN: Minio – S3 Compatible Object Storage (opens in new tab)

Hello HN,

Here is a bit more explanation about erasure code and bit-rot protection.

Minio along with being S3 compatible also protects data against hardware failures and silent data corruption using erasure code and checksums. You may lose roughly half the number ((N/2)-1) of drives and still be able to recover the data.

Minio uses Reed-Solomon code to stripe objects into N/2 data and N/2 parity blocks. This means that in a 12 drive setup, an object is striped across as 6 data and 6 parity blocks. You can lose as many as 5 drives (be it parity or data) and still reconstruct the data reliably from the remaining drives.

Minio also supports bit-rot detection transparently which works along with erasure code using high speed BLAKE2 - https://github.com/minio/blake2b-simd hash based checksums.

While I commend the developers of Minio for building what appears to be a functional S3-API-compatible system in Go Lang it seems to me to be missing the key thing that makes S3 a compelling object/data storage solution -- the distributed part. Meaning, while I see that a Minio developer (y4m4b4) talks about erasure coding, something when talking about AWS/S3 normally refers to the way data is encoded and replicated across nodes to mitigate outright data loss as well as bit rot, their description states "You may lose roughly half the number of drives..." -- "drives" not "systems" or "nodes". This appears to be a single node solution, or have I overlooked the documentation describing how to join nodes together into a cluster? The description given is much more akin to RAID, which is fine and useful for distributing data across disks connected to a single system.

I hope that this is just an early announcement of a thing that is going to mature into a fully distributed solution, or that it is made clear that this is like SQLite (Minio is to AWS/S3 as SQLite is to RDBMS systems [PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.]) -- something intended to be smaller in scope and single node only. Leaving this fuzzy will lead to many people being confused and potentially someone depending on this system and later dealing with massive data loss when their drive or drives fail.

Could the developers of Minio please make a statement as to which direction they intending on going? Is this a single node S3-API compatible solution (which is valuable for a specific class of problems) or something that will eventually be designed to store data across 10s/100s/1000s of nodes geographically distributed all working together to maintain some degree of availability and data integrity?

What's Minio going to be when it grows up? a) S3Lite b) S3

I tried minio and was really impressed with how easy it is to get started.

But I couldn't figure out how to scale it or make it reliable. Having my entire system depend on a single server not going down is a non-starter for me. Do you consider this use case in-scope?

I've been looking at Skylable instead. While setting it up is a little clunky, it's the only open source package I've found that explicitly supports replication across multiple datacenters - which is even more interesting to me than simply across servers within a data center.

Wow this looks interesting. Nice job team minio