MinIO Operator

MinIO is a Kubernetes-native high performance object store with an S3-compatible API. The MinIO Kubernetes Operator supports deploying MinIO Tenants onto private and public cloud infrastructures (“Hybrid” Cloud).

This README provides a high level description of the MinIO Operator and quickstart instructions. See https://min.io/docs/minio/kubernetes/upstream/index.html for complete documentation on the MinIO Operator.

Architecture
Deploy the MinIO Operator and Create a Tenant
- Prerequisites
- Procedure

Architecture

Each MinIO Tenant represents an independent MinIO Object Store within the Kubernetes cluster. The following diagram describes the architecture of a MinIO Tenant deployed into Kubernetes:

Tenant Architecture

MinIO provides multiple methods for accessing and managing the MinIO Tenant:

Deploy the MinIO Operator and Create a Tenant

This procedure installs the MinIO Operator and creates a 4-node MinIO Tenant for supporting object storage operations in a Kubernetes cluster.

Prerequisites

Kubernetes 1.28.0 or Later

Starting with Operator v6.0.0, MinIO requires Kubernetes version 1.28.0 or later. You must upgrade your Kubernetes cluster to 1.28.0 or later to use Operator v6.0.0+.

This procedure assumes the host machine has kubectl installed and configured with access to the target Kubernetes cluster.

MinIO Tenant Namespace

MinIO supports no more than one MinIO Tenant per Namespace. The following kubectl command creates a new namespace for the MinIO Tenant.

kubectl create namespace minio-tenant

Tenant Storage Class

The MinIO Kubernetes Operator automatically generates Persistent Volume Claims (PVC) as part of deploying a MinIO Tenant.

The plugin defaults to creating each PVC with the default Kubernetes Storage Class. If the default storage class cannot support the generated PVC, the tenant may fail to deploy.

MinIO Tenants require that the StorageClass sets volumeBindingMode to WaitForFirstConsumer. The default StorageClass may use the Immediate setting, which can cause complications during PVC binding. MinIO strongly recommends creating a custom StorageClass for use by PV supporting a MinIO Tenant.

The following StorageClass object contains the appropriate fields for supporting a MinIO Tenant using MinIO DirectPV-managed drives:

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: directpv-min-io
provisioner: kubernetes.io/no-provisioner
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer

Tenant Persistent Volumes

The MinIO Operator generates one Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) for each volume in the tenant plus two PVC to support collecting Tenant Metrics and logs. The cluster must have sufficient Persistent Volumes that meet the capacity requirements of each PVC for the tenant to start correctly. For example, deploying a Tenant with 16 volumes requires 18 (16 + 2). If each PVC requests 1TB capacity, then each PV must also provide at least 1TB of capacity.

MinIO recommends using the MinIO DirectPV Driver to automatically provision Persistent Volumes from locally attached drives. This procedure assumes MinIO DirectPV is installed and configured.

For clusters which cannot deploy MinIO DirectPV, use Local Persistent Volumes. The following example YAML describes a local persistent volume:

The following YAML describes a local PV:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: <PV-NAME>
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 1Ti
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  storageClassName: local-storage
  local:
    path: </mnt/disks/ssd1>
  nodeAffinity:
    required:
      nodeSelectorTerms:
        - matchExpressions:
            - key: kubernetes.io/hostname
              operator: In
              values:
                - <NODE-NAME>

Replace values in brackets <VALUE> with the appropriate value for the local drive.

You can estimate the number of PVC by multiplying the number of minio server pods in the Tenant by the number of drives per node. For example, a 4-node Tenant with 4 drives per node requires 16 PVC and therefore 16 PV.

MinIO strongly recommends using the following CSI drivers for creating local PV to ensure best object storage performance:

Procedure

1) Install the MinIO Operator via Kustomization

The standard kubectl tool ships with support for kustomize out of the box, so you can use that to install MiniO Operator.

kubectl kustomize github.com/minio/operator\?ref=v6.0.4 | kubectl apply -f -

Run the following command to verify the status of the Operator:

kubectl get pods -n minio-operator

The output resembles the following:

NAME                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
minio-operator-69fd675557-lsrqg   1/1     Running   0          99s

2) Build the Tenant Configuration

We provide a variety of examples for creating MinIO Tenants in the examples directory. The following example creates a 4-node MinIO Tenant with 4 volumes per node:

kubectl apply -k github.com/minio/operator/examples/kustomization/base

3) Connect to the Tenant

Use the following command to list the services created by the MinIO Operator:

kubectl get svc -n NAMESPACE

Replace NAMESPACE with the namespace for the MinIO Tenant. The output resembles the following:

NAME                             TYPE            CLUSTER-IP        EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)      
minio                            LoadBalancer    10.104.10.9       <pending>     443:31834/TCP
myminio-console           LoadBalancer    10.104.216.5      <pending>     9443:31425/TCP
myminio-hl                ClusterIP       None              <none>        9000/TCP
myminio-log-hl-svc        ClusterIP       None              <none>        5432/TCP
myminio-log-search-api    ClusterIP       10.102.151.239    <none>        8080/TCP
myminio-prometheus-hl-svc ClusterIP       None              <none>        9090/TCP

Applications internal to the Kubernetes cluster should use the minio service for performing object storage operations on the Tenant.

Administrators of the Tenant should use the minio-tenant-1-console service to access the MinIO Console and manage the Tenant, such as provisioning users, groups, and policies for the Tenant.

MinIO Tenants deploy with TLS enabled by default, where the MinIO Operator uses the Kubernetes certificates.k8s.io API to generate the required x.509 certificates. Each certificate is signed using the Kubernetes Certificate Authority (CA) configured during cluster deployment. While Kubernetes mounts this CA on Pods in the cluster, Pods do not trust that CA by default. You must copy the CA to a directory such that the update-ca-certificates utility can find and add it to the system trust store to enable validation of MinIO TLS certificates:

cp /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/ca.crt /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/
update-ca-certificates

For applications external to the Kubernetes cluster, you must configure Ingress or a Load Balancer to expose the MinIO Tenant services. Alternatively, you can use the kubectl port-forward command to temporarily forward traffic from the local host to the MinIO Tenant.

License

Use of MinIO Operator is governed by the GNU AGPLv3 or later, found in the LICENSE file.

Explore Further

MinIO Hybrid Cloud Storage Documentation

Github Resources