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MinIO for Amazon Elastic
Kubernetes Service

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Customers run MinIO on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for following three reasons.
1.

MinIO serves as a consistent storage layer in a hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud deployment scenario.

2.

Unify disparate silos (enterprise IT, data/HDFS and modern workloads/apps) for greater efficiency, security and resiliency.VMware customers can rapidly and easily deploy multi-tenant object-storage-as-a-service with just a few clicks in the vCenter console.

3.

Running MinIO on EKS provides control over the software stack with the attendant flexibility necessary to avoid cloud lock-in.

Architecture

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that you can use to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes.

MinIO provides a portable high-performance object storage system across all of the major Kubernetes platforms (Tanzu, Azure, GCP, OpenShift). On AWS, MinIO natively integrates with the Amazon EKS service making it easier to operate your own large scale multi-tenant object storage as a service. MinIO is a complete drop-in replacement for AWS S3 storage-as-a-service.

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Unlike AWS S3, MinIO enables applications to scale across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure, without requiring expensive software rewrites or proprietary integrations. Because MinIO is containerized and Kubernetes-native it can be rolled out across these platforms without requiring specialized skills to operate large scale storage infrastructure.

The AIStor Operator integrates natively with EKS and AWS features to provide:

Storage Classes and Tiering
External Load Balancing
Encryption Key Management
Identity Management
Certificate Management
Monitoring and Alerting
Logging and Auditing

Storage Classes and Tiering‍

Tier across AWS EBS, S3, S3 IA and Glacier.

A key requirement for deploying MinIO at scale on EKS and AWS is the ability to transition objects across AWS storage types. Specifically, you want support for cost-optimized "Hot-Warm" and "Hot-Cold" deployment topologies.

MinIO can use a S3 bucket as a remote tier for automatic transition of aged objects based on user-configured rules. For example, you can create one rule that transitions objects to a tier with the S3 Standard storage class, while another rule transitions objects to a tier with the S3 Standard-IA storage class.

MinIO supports transitioning an object once - so while you cannot configure "waterfall" or "chain" transition from MinIO -> Standard -> Standard-IA, you can configure multiple rules per bucket using prefix and object tags to apply granular transition behavior to the preferred remote tier. MinIO's only requirement is that the remote storage must support immediate retrieval of objects - no rehydration, latency, or wait times.

MinIO tiering requires no client-side logic changes. Your clients can continue to request an object through MinIO, and MinIO handles retrieving the object from S3 and returning it transparently. MinIO also supports using the S3 restore API for returning objects back to the "hot" MinIO deployment.

MinIO's tiering capability extends to hybrid cloud environments where the MinIO JBOD/JBOF deployment acts as the performance-optimized "hot" tier on the private cloud, while S3 provides cost-optimized "warm" and "cold" tiers. Leverage MinIO TLS and Server-Side Encryption to further protect all data in both clouds, at rest and in flight.

External Load Balancing

Load balance incoming requests with AWS Elastic Load Balancing.

The AIStor Operator integrates tightly with the AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to provide automatic load balancing and routing service across multiple MinIO tenants for applications accessing the storage service from outside of AWS. Exposing a MinIO tenant to external traffic can be done by simply adding annotations to a MinIO tenant. This service enables applications to scale and be accessed by hundreds of millions of devices across the planet.

Encryption Key Management

Manage encryption keys with AWS Key Management Service.

For cloud-native applications, the best practices dictate storing keys outside of the object system in an external vault. Amazon Key Management Service (KMS) is a secure and resilient service for managing keys by API across AWS services.

For those with more stringent security requirements or for consistency purposes, MinIO integrates with a number of external Key Management Services that operate outside of AWS.

When using MinIO as the object storage in the public EKS environment, encryption on-disk is strongly recommended. MinIO uses AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption to protect data integrity and confidentiality with negligible performance impact. The AIStor Operator allows for tenants to be configured for the Amazon KMS or a supported third-party KMS for automatic server-side encryption of objects.

MinIO supports setting a bucket-level default encryption key in the KMS with support for per-object encryption keys (SSE-KMS) and a broad per-deployment encryption key (SSE-S3).

MinIO will use this KMS to bootstrap its internal key encryption server (KES service) to enable high-performance per object encryption. Each tenant runs its own KES server in an isolated namespace.

Identity Management

Manage identity and policy with AWS Directory Service and AWS Identity Service.

When running MinIO on AWS EKS, customers can manage the single sign-on (SSO) through Amazon’s hosted Identity Management Service or third party OpenID Connect/LDAP compatible identity providers like Keycloak, Okta/Auth0, Google, Facebook, ActiveDirectory and OpenLDAP.

A single, centralized IDP allows administrators to add, change privileges for, or eliminate a user, service account, or group once - and have it be enforced across all public cloud, private cloud and edge MinIO servers. The ability to have a unified identity and access management (IAM) layer independent of the infrastructure provides significant architectural flexibility.

Certificate Management

Configure and manage certificates with AWS Certificate Manager.

All traffic from the application to MinIO, including internode traffic, is encrypted with TLS. TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of network-connected resources, such as a MinIO server domain.

MinIO integrates with the AWS Certificate Manager to automatically configure, provision, manage and update certificates for the MinIO tenants. The tenants are completely isolated from each other in their own Kubernetes namespace with their own certificates for improved security.

Monitoring and Alerting

Track metrics and issue alerts using AWS Managed Prometheus.

MinIO recommends using the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) for monitoring and alerting on MinIO EKS instances. MinIO publishes every object storage related Prometheus metric imaginable, from bucket capacity to access metrics. Those metrics can be collected and visualized in any Prometheus-compatible tool or the MinIO Console.

External monitoring solutions scrape the MinIO Prometheus endpoint at regular intervals. MinIO recommends either Grafana or the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) depending on the architectural goals. These same tools can also be used to establish baselines and set alert thresholds for notifications, which can then be routed to a notification platform such as PagerDuty, Freshservice or even SNMP.

Logging and Auditing

Output logs to AWS ElasticSearch for analysis.

Enabling MinIO auditing generates a log for every operation on the object storage cluster. In addition to the audit log, MinIO also logs console errors for operational troubleshooting purposes.

MinIO supports outputting logs to AWS Elasticsearch (or third parties) for analysis and alerting.

Note:

MinIO does not recommend running MinIO in AWS if AWS is the only anticipated instance. Rather, MinIO in AWS should be reserved for scenarios where the organization seeks consistency across multiple environments.

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MinIO for Amazon Elastic
Kubernetes Service

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