Object Management

An object is binary data, sometimes referred to as a Binary Large OBject (BLOB). Blobs can be images, audio files, spreadsheets, or even binary executable code. Object Storage platforms like MinIO provide dedicated tools and capabilities for storing, retrieving, and searching for blobs.

MinIO Object Storage uses buckets to organize objects. A bucket is similar to a folder or directory in a filesystem, where each bucket can hold an arbitrary number of objects. MinIO buckets provide the same functionality as AWS S3 buckets.

For example, consider an application that hosts a web blog. The application needs to store a variety of blobs, including rich multimedia like videos and images. The structure of objects on the MinIO server might look similar to the following:

/ #root
/images/
   2020-01-02-MinIO-Diagram.png
   2020-01-03-MinIO-Advanced-Deployment.png
   MinIO-Logo.png
/videos/
   2020-01-04-MinIO-Interview.mp4
/articles/
   /john.doe/
      2020-01-02-MinIO-Object-Storage.md
      2020-01-02-MinIO-Object-Storage-comments.json
   /jane.doe/
      2020-01-03-MinIO-Advanced-Deployment.png
      2020-01-02-MinIO-Advanced-Deployment-comments.json
      2020-01-04-MinIO-Interview.md

MinIO supports multiple levels of nested directories and objects using a prefix structure to support even the most dynamic object storage workloads.

MinIO itself does not limit the number of objects that any specific prefix can contain. However, hardware and network conditions may show performance impacts with large prefixes.

• Deployments with modest or budget-focused hardware should architect their workloads to target 10,000 objects per prefix as a baseline. Increase this target based on benchmarking and monitoring of real world workloads up to what the hardware can meaningfully handle.

• Deployments with high-performance or enterprise-grade hardware can typically handle prefixes with millions of objects or more.

MinIO SUBNET Enterprise accounts can utilize yearly architecture reviews as part of the deployment and maintenance strategy to ensure long-term performance and success of your MinIO-dependent projects.

For a deeper discussion on the benefits of limiting prefix contents, see the article on optimizing S3 performance .

Object Versioning

MinIO supports keeping multiple “versions” of an object in a single bucket. Write operations which would normally overwrite an existing object instead result in the creation of a new versioned object.

MinIO versioning protects from unintended overwrites and deletions while providing support for “undoing” a write operation.

See Bucket Versioning for more complete documentation.

Object Retention

MinIO Object Locking (“Object Retention”) enforces Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) immutability to protect versioned objects from deletion. MinIO supports both duration based object retention and indefinite Legal Hold retention .

See MinIO Object Locking for more complete documentation.

MinIO Object Locking provides key data retention compliance and meets SEC17a-4(f), FINRA 4511(C), and CFTC 1.31(c)-(d) requirements as per Cohasset Associates .