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An open source object storage solution

Object Lesson

Article from ADMIN 75/2023

By Artur Skura

We introduce the MinIO high-performance object store, its key features and applications, and some performance tips.

The world of data storage has evolved over the years, and as the amount of data we generate and manage continues to grow, we need more efficient and scalable storage solutions. One such solution is object storage, which has become increasingly popular because of its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and scalability.

Object storage is a data storage architecture that stores data as objects, rather than as files in a hierarchical filesystem or blocks in a block storage system. Each object includes the data, metadata, and a unique identifier, allowing for easier access and management of large amounts of unstructured data.

In this article I introduce you to MinIO, a popular object storage solution. MinIO's source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, which means you can customize, extend, and contribute to the project.

Overview of MinIO

MinIO is a high-performance, open source, object storage system compatible with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and designed for unstructured data (see the "Key Features" box). Developed with a focus on simplicity, scalability, and performance, MinIO is designed for use in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. MinIO supports a wide range of use cases, including big data analytics, machine learning (ML), backup, and archiving. In particular, MinIO's high throughput and low-latency performance make it well-suited for artificial intelligence (AI) and ML workloads. Data scientists around the world use MinIO to store large volumes of training data and serve it to ML models for training and inference.

Key Features

One of the most prominent MinIO features is S3 application programming interface (API) compatibility, which makes it easy to integrate with existing applications and services built for Amazon S3. Since

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