MinIO for Google Kubernetes Engine

Storage Classes and Tiering

The key requirement to deploy MinIO at scale on GKE and GCP is the ability tier across storage classes (SSD, GCS, GCS for Data Archive). This allows enterprises to manage both cost and performance.

MinIO can be configured to automatically transition aged objects from the fast SSD tier to a more cost-efficient GCS tier and even the cost-optimized GCS for Data Archive storage tier. For example, MinIO tiering policy can be configured with SSD as the primary tier, GCS as the secondary tier and GCS for Data Archive as the tertiary, or archival tier.

When tiering, MinIO maintains a single object storage namespace by transparently retrieving transitioned objects without additional client-side logic. MinIO also supports using the S3 restore API for bringing objects back onto the "hot" performance-optimized storage infrastructure.

This same capability also extends to hybrid cloud environments where the JBOD/JBOF act as the hot tier on the private cloud side and GCS acts as the warm and cold tier. The data on the public cloud remains encrypted - ensuring that data is safe at rest and in flight.

External Load Balancing

The MinIO Operator integrates tightly with GCP Cloud Load Balancing (CLB) to provide automatic load balancing and routing service across multiple MinIO tenants for applications accessing the storage service from outside of GKE. Exposing a MinIO tenant to external traffic can be done by simply adding annotations to a MinIO tenant.

Encryption Key Management

MinIO recommends using Google Cloud Key Management to store keys outside of the object storage system. 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 GCP.

For all production environments we recommend enabling encryption on all buckets by default. MinIO uses AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption to protect data integrity and confidentiality with negligible performance impact.

MinIO supports setting a bucket-level default encryption key in the KMS with support for AWS-S3 semantics (SSE-S3). Clients can also specify a separate key on the KMS using SSE-KMS request headers.

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 Services

When running MinIO on GCP GKE, customers can manage single sign-on (SSO) through Google’s hosted GCP Cloud Identity or third party OpenID Connect/LDAP compatible identity providers like Okta/Auth0, Google, Facebook, Keycloak, 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

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.

MinIO integrates with GKE Managed Certificates to 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

GCP provides robust monitoring capabilities for GKE using Google Cloud Stackdriver. We recommend using Google Cloud Stackdriver as a Prometheus-compatible system for monitoring and alerting when deploying MinIO on GKE. The reason for this recommendation is that 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 (Stackdriver being native to GCP) or in the MinIO Console.

Monitoring services scrape the MinIO Prometheus endpoint at regular intervals. 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 or Freshservice.

Logging and Auditing

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 recommends outputting logs to GCP Cloud Logging or an Elastic Stack depending on architectural goals.