AbdelrahimAhmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Scientist at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Real User
Top 10
A great all-in-one, user-friendly data storage system
Pros and Cons
  • "This is an all-in-one, user-friendly data storage."
  • "There is a lack of good addons to integrate without having to use third-party applications."

What is our primary use case?

We are using this solution as a data link, to store data in a structured dataset. We've been testing the functionalities and how we can integrate our system into it. We are customers of MinIO and I'm a data scientist. 

What is most valuable?

This is an all-in-one, user-friendly data storage solution. It provides high throughput to access data. We tend to use AI and some of the resource-intensive applications related to data, like analysis and visualization. I like the S3 API.

What needs improvement?

I feel there is a lack of good addons to integrate without having to use third-party applications. It makes the process time-consuming. It would be helpful if MinIO built artifacts or anything that could be used to stream data into it. That said, I'm not sure MinIO is different from other solutions. Hopefully, data governance will improve in the future. I'd also like to see more support for AI. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for four months. 

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I can't judge stability yet because we're only using a couple of megabytes or gigabytes, it's very small. We probably have three or four potential users in the company. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I previously worked with Hadoop which I found to be a little bit more complex than MinIO which is easier to use. I chose MinIO because I like the S3 API. We were looking for an all-in-one solution to backup or to carry out disaster recovery, and to have a place where we can store a new dataset for analysis and something for big data and AI.

I generally recommend it in favor of Hadoop Distributed File System because I can see more benefits and it's a little bit cheaper if you download it on-premises compared to Amazon S3.

How was the initial setup?

The standalone is really easy to deploy. I think we'll deploy four nodes and I'll use Docker Swarm for that.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We are using the free version. This is still a new system and I think it's a good idea to have a free version to test before purchasing a license.

What other advice do I have?

It's difficult to comment on the product because we haven't completed testing or deployed it in the production environment.  Moving to MinIO involves a learning curve. It's a question of whether someone is prepared to put in the effort to learn the solution and whether they have sufficient experience. The decision to use it needs to be based on whether it's for backup only or for backup and disaster recovery. Then there's the option to use it for analytics and AI, which is more complex and requires integration with other tools.

Once the solution has more maturity, I think it will become a dominant product. For now, I rate it eight out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Software Architect at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Good file management, but has some connection issues
Pros and Cons
  • "MinIO can work with attributes and folders, and it has the ability to use a stream approach for files. I have moments that should work exclusively. It also has some management features you can use, like exclusive locks that you can perform on one record or a collection."
  • "MinIO has behaved strangely in the past. For instance, the application dropped connection to MinIO. It's not too significant, but it loses connection. We're trying to understand exactly what is happening when this happens."

What is our primary use case?

We are a service provider for the financial sector. We make solutions for our biggest town and guys from this town. The government is trying to keep specific information inside the country, so we developed a solution with that goal in mind. 

MinIO was deployed in the center of the Kubernetes cluster, and it's used for keeping files. What's more interesting is how MinIO works with a file. So we used our widget in this instance. For the first approach, we got files from a user proficient system, I believe it's called. We got everything moving on FTP. After that, we put it all into MinIO on our internal partition. So that means transforming and preparing for transfer to the bank. With MinIO, you are preparing a pipeline of folders, where each folder maintains a particular stable file. So for that, we're using MinIO's ability to work with attributes and transfer copies of region files via the stream. As a solution, we use MinIO just like a file keeper. We use characteristics for storage then triple the small source from history 

MinIO's use case varies from project to project. In that case, guys from the company used MinIO as a solution for their particular system. It wasn't my decision to use MinIO. For my company, we use another approach because I work at Russian Post. It's a specific company with government contracts, and we have a lot of work requirements about what solutions we can use.

What is most valuable?

MinIO can work with attributes and folders, and it has the ability to use a stream approach for files. I have moments that should work exclusively. It also has some management features you can use, like exclusive locks that you can perform on one record or a collection. 

What needs improvement?

MinIO has behaved strangely in the past. For instance, the application dropped connection to MinIO. It's not too significant, but it loses connection. We're trying to understand exactly what is happening when this happens. Maybe the team at MinIO should work on this error because, at this time, it's unclear why this happens.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've used MinIO for three months. We made two solutions in MinIO and used it to keep the bank's files and write up payment systems. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I've never had trouble with the equipment, especially with DUI surges. I had connectivity issues, but it's not a problem with MinIO. The general lot level was not so high, and it didn't present any problems. Since we're not getting so many requests, we keep it all in MinIO and process it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I think MinIO is not so hard to scale. Our guys are using part of this scale to replicate data, and this process was not very hard to scale. Right now, we have two teams using it. We make a solution for the financial part, and the other guys make one for customer data. And two teams were enough for that time. It was 10 or 12 developers.

How are customer service and support?

I've never had to call MinIO support

How was the initial setup?

Guys from DevOps helped us, so setting up MinIO was not so difficult.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Compared to SAS, MinIO is more straightforward from the developer side. It's easier to work with API. Most file solutions are similar when it comes to storage and how they work with ChAS SCP and Java. And when I compare, I'm trying to understand what the goal is and what level the developer should be working on with one of the solutions. I think MinIO is easier to use compared to Java API or for working this fast.

What other advice do I have?

I rate MinIO seven out of 10. I say seven because I've worked with finance and require consistency and work with exclusive locks. From the standpoint of a coder or a developer, it's a good solution that's easy to use, connect, and prepare requests with. It doesn't require a lot of complex skills, and it's easy to put into your application. 

For people considering MinIO, I generally recommend understanding what level of consistency you want when working with these files. Also, you want to consider what kind of file reporting procedure you need, like streaming or batch processing. And, if you want some locks, like exclusive locks, then maybe you don't want MinIO. But for other sites, it's suitable.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Product Owner at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Great compatibility with different kinds of storage and easy to use
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution has good compatibility with different kinds of storage."
  • "We had minor bugs occasionally."

What is our primary use case?

A multi-tenant data space solution that in our case, consumes and stores large amounts of traffic sensor data for multiple cities worldwide. 

Right from the start the data-space solution we were building was supposed to be cloud native & cloud agnostic, hence instead of interacting with AWS-S3 using SDK we were using minIO as a gateway over AWS-s3 store. 

We're long-standing customers of MinIO. I was a senior member of the technical staff with the team who built the data-space solution.

How has it helped my organization?

While being well suit for kubernates, MinIO also made solution cloud agnostic in storage operations.  

For one of the customer due to regulatory constraints, we had to deploy the product on-prem with no access to AWS or open internet. MinIO out-of-the-box supports NFS share (volume) object store. It meant that rather than having to look out for or move to a new product we could stick with MinIO and adapt to newer environment requirements. Secondly, the APIs are quite well documented, including the setup onto Kubernetes clusters and we were able to reduce our ops efforts.

What is most valuable?

The solution has good compatibility with different kinds of storage and that was a major feature for us. 

We were using Presto, a query engine, which out-of-the-box connects to MinIO. 

MinIO provides APIs which have extensive documentation. 

The solution also has a good UI. During the development phase team sometimes needed to go through the data structure to see how data was getting stored. The UI helped us to debug the data quickly.

MinIO is easy to understand, simple to implement and provides a good feature set. 

What needs improvement?

There is nothing major that needs to be improved. 

While using some of the advance features of MinIO we encountered the minor bugs but they generally get fixed in version upgrades. 

I would like to see some kind of graphical representation of underlined data on MinIO UI. Like size, document type etc.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for a year and a half.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Setting up MinIO on Kubernetes has its own perks. In terms of stability, Kubernetes took care of most things like spinning up new pod/node when existing one is down. More over MinIO itself is quite a stable application with less of application crashing instances and hardly any downtime in any of our environments. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

With high availability configuration it's easy to scale when running on Kubernetes.  

From a development team perspective, we have around eight users for either the console or API. From the application perspective, we had Presto, the query engine with connecting with system user.

How are customer service and support?

Because the solution is open source we used the community to find solution of most of the problems we ran into.  

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was quite a straightforward process. The documentation which was provided in the Helm chart repository, was quite comprehensive and easy to access. The DevOps team carried out the deployment. Deploying the helm chart with default configuration doesn't take much time, it's a single line command. But if you want to do high availability production grade setup, then it might take couple of days.

What about the implementation team?

Inhouse team set it up & maintaining it.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is free for personal use but for large organizations/ commercial use, seems there are some charges involved. 

What other advice do I have?

If you want to go with MinIO setup, I suggest using a Kubernetes-based setup using helm chart because it's quite easy to manage and will less of a learning curve. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Great for finding compatible libraries
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable features are that MinIO is open, it works on-premise, and is compatible with the Amazon industry which is great for finding compatible libraries in many languages which is very good for developers."
  • "MinIO could use a time patch on it. It could also use better documentation for some languages like Python."

What is our primary use case?

I am a software developer. My company was using MinIO to build new frontend applications. We were modernizing the desktop branch application into a web application because it was a modular application with lots of screens. 

We didn't want the architect team to increase the size of the client applications. We also did not want a single package as our clients in rural areas would not be able to efficiently load application pages from a very long package network. 

We were looking for a better way to optimize the load so MinIO was able to customize web packaging for the frontend and then decompose the web application components. We were packaging everything into a single package. By using MinIO we now optimize the transfer by providing storage for the packages.

Also, our development team had been deploying machine learning algorithms and modules were being produced. Some of these pilot projects do not end up going into production, so we use MinIO as storage for the data produced from machine learning. It works like a Git for machine learning models. The data is posted to Git and the actual files with the hashes are stored in MinIO. The IDs of those models are stored as metadata. It's a model versioning system for machine learning projects.

We deploy MinIO in our data centers as a local version.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are that MinIO is open, it works on-premise, and is compatible with the Amazon industry which is great for finding compatible libraries in many languages which is very good for developers.

What needs improvement?

MinIO could use a time patch on it. It could also use better documentation for some languages like Python. 

For how long have I used the solution?

The company I was working for had been using MinIO for almost two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The company was using MinIO in production, it was stable because we depend on it for production. I have complaints about the stability.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The company was just putting files on a server disk prior to using MinIO.

How was the initial setup?

The solution is a service provided to developers, so our systems and DevOps team was responsible for deploying MinIO.

What other advice do I have?

I did not have any problems with MinIO, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Saddam-ZEMMALI - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Technical Lead at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Top 10
Easy to use, reliable, and quick setup
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of MinIO is its ease of use, replication, and active directory. All the capabilities are in this solution."
  • "The documentation of the solution should improve."

What is our primary use case?

I am using the solution for a POC. I am using MinIO to share volumes between different containers.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of MinIO is its ease of use, replication, and active directory. All the capabilities are in this solution.

What needs improvement?

The documentation of the solution should improve.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using MinIO for approximately one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of MinIO is great.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have approximately eight people using the solution.

The solution is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

I have not used the support from the vendor. I have not had any problems.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was simple. We had to download some samples and do the configuration. The process can be done quickly, but the full POC tool many months, and it can be complicated.

What about the implementation team?

I did the deployment of two nodes.

What other advice do I have?

We have done the POC and next will be the production, I recommend the solution.

I rate MinIO an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Data Engineer at Mofid
Real User
Top 5
Easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain solution
Pros and Cons
  • "It performs efficiently compared to other solutions."
  • "Its reverse proxy features could be better."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution for object storage in our core platform. It works best as a data lake solution for us.

What is most valuable?

The solution is simple to use and maintain for DevOps executives. Also, it has the best performance compared to other solutions.

What needs improvement?

The solution's features for distributed non-container applications and reverse proxy could be better.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for three months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable solution. I rate its stability ten out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is a scalable solution. It uses consistent patching; thus, it is more scalable than other solutions. Although, we encountered a few scalability-related issues while introducing a new node.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used Azure solution before. It was challenging to maintain the Kubernetes cluster.

How was the initial setup?

The solution's initial setup was straightforward. We deployed it through Ansible playboards. It took about three days to complete.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We use the solution's open-source version.

What other advice do I have?

I recommend the solution to start-up businesses. It is the best tool in the market if they want a simple and low-maintenance product. Also, it requires DevOps expertise for the smooth functioning of scalability and reverse proxy features.

I rate it eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
senior software Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Real User
Provides an excellent approach to development and testing environments
Pros and Cons
  • "Good interface and a good approach to development and testing environments."
  • "Documentation could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case of this solution is for the microservices architecture built with .NET Core. I'm a senior software engineer and we are customers of MinIO

How has it helped my organization?

The solution has provided the company with a super approach in development and testing environments which is what we were looking for. 

What is most valuable?

The solution has a good interface. We initially used several commands for configuring in the Docker Compose to create the default bucket and to make it public. It was pretty easy to use and fulfilled our requirements. It's quite powerful.

What needs improvement?

We had some issues with the initial configuration which I think could be improved by working on the documentation. I had to search different sources to get what I needed. 

The MinIO client was hard to automatize, we had to include some scripting on startup of the client container so that the buckets were setup with the read/write permissions and to make it public and accessible

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for two years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We haven't had any issues with stability. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The way we deployed the test environment was to have just one instance for every container so every user was able to run their own test environment and we didn't need to scale. There were somewhere between 20 and 30 users, product owners and testers. The solution didn't require any maintenance. Expanding use will depend on the amount of information they have to store. 

How was the initial setup?

In the test environment we were using Terraform scripts with the commands for the MinIO Client to set up the MinIO, and all the containers were deployed to a Nomad Ecosystem. We used the continuous deployment to deploy and create the test environments with Azure DevOps. There were three back end developers and two DevOps people that helped with deployment but I did most of it, configuring the continuous integration and deployment of the project. 

The most difficult part of the setup was to configure the MinIO Client, because I'm used to working with Windows and the Docker containers were running on a Linux container. I had to figure out the commands, create the bucket and make it public. It took a bit of research and documentation was an issue.

What other advice do I have?

The solution was intended for private cloud, but we also had an on-premise installation which meant we could manually install the MinIO in every computer required. For on-premise installations, we could install MinIO and just change the connection string of the service using that MinIO. I recommend the solution, it's quite simple to implement and is very powerful because if you need to run the storage in your computer it's as simple as having a container of MinIO. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Technical Lead and Senior Java Developer at Novin High-Tech Solutions
Real User
Easy to manage and has a powerful API
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is the ease of management and administration."
  • "The monitoring capability is really bad and needs to be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We are a solution provider and I am working on a project that is using MinIO for storage.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the ease of management and administration. I do not have a system administrator in my project, so the simplicity of management is important to me.

What needs improvement?

The monitoring capability is really bad and needs to be improved. There are no monitoring tools available and there are several metrics that I would like to keep track of. Without good usage monitoring, it will be very hard to use in production.

In my opinion, the monitoring feature should be added to minIO in order to give administrators efficient data including bucket information(size, load on it, requests …), the CPU usage, running/ stuck/blocked threads, queue of thread pools, free/max heap percent, request per object in buckets and ...

I think providing REST API for monitoring and configuration makes it easier to use.

If I can set up MinIO to run as a service then it will be more stable.

Enhancing the user interface with more options would be a nice improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using MinIO for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable product and I use it every day. If I were able to set it up as a service then the stability would be improved.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

MinIO is scalable, although we do not rely on that right now. In the future, we will be expanding it. At this time, we have a team of five developers who are using MinIO.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have not needed support to this point, as I seek help in the community when I have issues. Furthermore, because we are located in Iran and under sanctions, were are not able to purchase technical support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I used to use Red Hat Ceph Storage, but it is more complex than MinIO and very difficult to manage because I do not have a system administrator on my team.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is very simple. It took me about 15 minutes to deploy five instances that had Java on it.

What about the implementation team?

I can easily deploy this solution using the command prompt.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

This is an open-source solution but I am using the licensed version.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

When I began this project, I researched several options for storage that were alternatives to Red Hat Ceph. I found that MinIO is the best choice for this project because of the API support.

What other advice do I have?

My advice for anybody who is implementing MinIO is to visit the website and view the documentation. It is very complete and is helpful. 

This is a good product choice for startups that don't have a system administrator. It has a good API and it's easy to use. My main complaint is about the lack of monitoring tools.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
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