MinIO Operator Guide

MinIO is a high performance distributed object storage server, designed for large-scale private cloud infrastructure. MinIO is designed in a cloud-native manner to scale sustainably in multi-tenant environments. Orchestration platforms like Kubernetes provide perfect launchpad for MinIO to scale. There are multiple options to deploy MinIO on Kubernetes:

• Helm Chart: MinIO Helm Chart offers customizable and easy MinIO deployment with a single command. Refer MinIO Helm Chart repository documentation for more details.

• YAML File: MinIO can be deployed with yaml files via kubectl. Refer MinIO yaml file documentation to deploy MinIO using yaml files.

• MinIO-Operator: Operator creates and manages distributed MinIO deployments running on Kubernetes, using CustomResourceDefinitions and Controller.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes API v1.15 and above.
• kubectl configured to refer to relevant Kubernetes cluster.

Create Operator and related resources

To start MinIO-Operator, use the docs/minio-operator.yaml file.

kubectl create -f https://github.com/minio/minio-operator/blob/master/docs/minio-operator.yaml?raw=true

This will create all relevant resources required for the Operator to work. Here is a list of resources created by above yaml file:

• Namespace: Custom namespace for MinIO-Operator. By default it is names as minio-operator-ns.
• CustomResourceDefinition: Custom resource definition named as minioinstances.miniocontroller.min.io.
• ClusterRole: A cluster wide role for the controller. It is named as minio-operator-role. This is used for RBAC.
• ServiceAccount: Service account is used by the custom controller to access the cluster. Account name by default is minio-operator-sa.
• ClusterRoleBinding: This cluster wide binding binds the service account minio-operator-sa to cluster role minio-operator-role.
• Deployment: Deployment creates a pod using the MinIO-Operator Docker image. This is where the custom controller runs and looks after any changes in custom resource.

Create a MinIO instance

Once MinIO-Operator deployment is running, you can create MinIO instances using the below command

kubectl create -f https://github.com/minio/minio-operator/blob/master/docs/minio-examples/minio-secret.yaml?raw=true
kubectl create -f https://github.com/minio/minio-operator/blob/master/docs/minio-examples/minioinstance.yaml?raw=true

Features

MinIO-Operator currently supports following features:

• Create and delete highly available distributed MinIO clusters.
• Upgrading existing distributed MinIO clusters.

Refer minioinstance.yaml for details on how to pass supported fields to the operator.

Upcoming features

• Federation and CoreDNS
• Continuous remote site mirroring with mc mirror

Explore Further

• MinIO Erasure Code QuickStart Guide
• Use mc with MinIO Server
• Use aws-cli with MinIO Server
• The MinIO documentation website