**MinIO** is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage system designed for cloud-native deployments. Where [[Ceph]]'s RadosGW provides S3 compatibility as one feature of a complex platform, MinIO does one thing — object storage — and does it extremely fast.
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### First Principle: If you only need object storage, don't pay the operational tax of a full distributed storage system.
MinIO can deliver over 325 GiB/s throughput on a single node with NVMe drives. It ships as a single binary, can be deployed in minutes, and is operationally trivial compared to [[Ceph]]. For workloads that only need S3-compatible object storage — ML training datasets, backups, application assets — MinIO is the simpler, faster choice.
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### Key Considerations
- **S3 Compatibility**: MinIO's API is S3-compatible. Any tool that works with AWS S3 works with MinIO without modification — boto3, s3cmd, the AWS CLI, most ML frameworks.
- **Erasure Coding**: MinIO uses erasure coding for data protection. An 8-drive erasure set can tolerate up to 4 drive failures while remaining fully readable.
- **Distributed Mode**: MinIO clusters spread data across multiple servers and drives. Minimum recommended configuration: 4 nodes × 4 drives each.
- **Kubernetes-Native**: MinIO ships a Kubernetes Operator for managing multi-tenant MinIO deployments on [[Kubernetes]].
- **vs [[Ceph]] RadosGW**: MinIO wins on simplicity, performance, and pure object storage use cases. Ceph wins when you also need block and file storage from the same cluster.
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### How It Fits
```
Applications (ML training, backups, assets)
→ MinIO (S3-compatible API)
→ Erasure-coded storage pool
→ NVMe / SSD drives on [[Bare Metal]] nodes
```
[[Ceph]] | [[Kubernetes]] | [[Longhorn]] | [[OpenStack]] | [[Open Source Hyperscaler MoC]]