S3 compatibility is a hard requirement for cloud-native applications. MinIO is unyielding
in its adherence to the API and with tens of thousands of users - both commercial and
community - MinIO’s S3 implementation is the most widely tested and implemented
alternative to AWS S3 in the world.
MinIO established itself as the standard for AWS S3 compatibility from its inception. One of the earliest adopters of the S3 API (both V2 and V4) and one of the only storage companies to focus exclusively on S3, MinIO’s massive community ensures that no other AWS alternative is more compatible.
The S3 API is the de facto standard in the cloud and, as a result, alternatives to AWS must speak the API fluently to function and interoperate across diverse environments - public cloud, private cloud, datacenter, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and at the edge.
There is only one path to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud compatibility and that is S3. As the RESTful API standard, S3 has revolutionized the interaction between applications, data and infrastructure. Further, the twin forces of containerization and orchestration with Kubernetes are also built around a RESTful API, relegating the POSIX API to legacy status.
The result is that Kubernetes-native, S3 compatible object storage and applications can run anywhere - from the various public cloud instances (MinIO has nearly 1M deployments across Google, Azure and AWS) to the private cloud ( Red Hat OpenShift , VMware Tanzu ), to baremetal. By leveraging sophisticated, S3 API powered ILM techniques, enterprises can execute operationally optimized instances across clouds and on-prem instances.
Customers interested in an S3 translation layer for their Microsoft Azure installations can purchase MinIO Blob Storage Gateway (S3 API) from Azure Marketplace.
The private cloud is a fundamental building block of any hybrid-cloud architecture. That means, like the public cloud, S3 compatibility is critical - no matter what the application - from analytics to artifactory to archival.
With MinIO, S3 compatibility is completely independent of location. That means that bare metal, on-premises instances of MinIO have the exact same S3 compatibility and performance as public cloud instances or even edge instances.
Cloud-native applications use the S3 API to communicate with object storage. But 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.
The most comprehensive support for the S3 API means that applications can leverage data stored in MinIO on any hardware, at any location and on any cloud. Developers are free to innovate and iterate, safe in the knowledge that MinIO will never break a release.
MinIO is the world’s fastest object store. That, coupled with its S3 compatibility ensures that it can run the broadest set of use cases in the industry. This includes modern application workloads like GitHub and GitLab for code repositories, modern analytics workloads like database storage for MongoDB , Clickhouse , MariaDB , CockroachDB , and Teradata to traditional archival, backup and disaster recovery use cases.
MinIO's performance characteristics, combined with its S3 compatibility have made it the standard for AI/ML and data science workloads. Tools like KubeFlow and TensorFlow require high-performance S3 compatible object storage and are increasingly designed for MinIO first and AWS or other clouds second. MinIO provides applications with true multi-cloud object storage and efficient replication. Applications written for the S3 API can run anywhere, giving developers the ability to rapidly innovate wherever the best cloud tooling is available.