MinIO Object Storage for SUSE Rancher #

MinIO makes it easy to deliver robust object storage for Kubernetes-native applications running in your SUSE Rancher environment.

This guide assumes that you have access to an existing Kubernetes cluster managed by SUSE Rancher. Deploying or importing Kubernetes clusters is covered elsewhere. A good place to start getting more details is the Rancher documentation.

The cluster should have at least four worker nodes for scheduling MinIO pods and services.

While MinIO is hardware agnostic and can function on consumer-grade hardware, the following recommendations for each worker node provide a baseline for high performance object storage:

The MinIO Operator enforces the following requirements for each tenant:

The worker nodes must have sufficient local PVs and capacity to support the number of drives in the deployment plus two additional drives for the LogSearch and Prometheus pods. For example, deploying a tenant with 16 drives requires 18 persistent volumes.

Tip

Be sure drives are provisioned in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) mode with no RAID, ZFS pooling, or other redundancy, resiliency, or tooling layers. MinIO implements erasure coding to provide object-level healing and resiliency with less overhead than adjacent technologies, such as RAID or replication.

Before proceeding, review the concepts of persistent volumes (PVs), persistent volume claims (PVCs), and storage classes in the Rancher documentation.

Tip

MinIO strongly recommends using direct-attached storage on each worker node.

The MinIO Operator generates PVCs for each storage resource required by the tenant. When creating a MinIO tenant, you specify the storage class to assign to each PVC. Kubernetes must bind each generated PVC to a PV with matching storage class for the tenant to successfully start.

MinIO is designed for a streamlined installation process. In a bare metal environment, you can deploy a large distributed MinIO cluster using the MinIO binaries and a handful of environment variables.

In a Kubernetes environment, provisioning large stateful services requires care as the full lifecycle and behavior of pods, networking, and other transient resources come into play. The MinIO Kubernetes Operator extends the Kubernetes API to support deploying MinIO tenants via the MinIO Operator Console GUI or using the kubectl minio plugin. The MinIO Operator fully manages all underlying operations associated with deploying and managing Kubernetes resources, allowing DevOps teams to focus on deploying and using their object storage resource.

You can use one of the three methods described below to deploy the MinIO Operator into a Kubernetes cluster managed by SUSE Rancher.

5.3 Install MinIO with the MinIO Kubernetes Plugin #

 

The MinIO Kubernetes Plugin can be used to deploy the MinIO Operator, create tenant CRDs, define cluster roles and more.

Follow the steps below to install and use the MinIO Kubernetes Plugin:

1. Start by installing Krew on your local system. You can use Krew to help you discover kubectl plugins, install them, and keep them up-to-date.

2. Refresh your local copy of the plugin index.

   kubectl krew update

3. Download, verify, and install the MinIO Kubernetes Plugin.

   kubectl krew install minio

4. Install the MinIO Operator.

   kubectl minio init

   By default, this command deploys the latest MinIO Operator into the 'minio-operator' namespace with the cluster domain of 'cluster.local'. Additional options can be passed with this command to customize these and other characteristics of the deployment.

Tip

Explore MinIO Kubernetes Plugin documentation for more information on options and capabilities.

With the MinIO Operator installed, you can now deploy a MinIO tenant to your cluster. Choose one of the three methods detailed next.

kubectl minio tenant create minio-tenant-1   	\
  --servers             	4                	\
  --volumes             	16               	\
  --capacity            	16TiB             	\
  --storage-class       	directpv-min-io	\
  --namespace           	minio-tenant-1

kubectl apply --kustomize <KUSTOMIZATION>

Each Kubernetes cluster has its own internal network within which pods and services can communicate. Applications deployed within the same cluster can connect to the MinIO tenant over this network. Clients external to the Kubernetes cluster require use of special network components, like ingress controllers and load balancers. Depending on your Kubernetes cluster configuration, MinIO services can automatically request and obtain an external IP address from a cluster load balancer.

7.1 Connect as a Kubernetes pod or service #

 

MinIO tenants use the Kubernetes networking layer for communication. Each tenant deploys a Kubernetes service, 'service/minio', that acts as a load balancer between MinIO pods.

Verify the deployed MinIO tenant services with the kubectl get svc -n <NAMESPACE> command.

For example, issue this command to list the services for a MinIO tenant, called 'minio-tenant-1':

kubectl get all -n minio-tenant-1 -o wide

Output would look something like:

NAME             TYPE         CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP       PORT(S)        AGE
minio            LoadBalancer 10.43.16.164 <pending>         443:31116/TCP  13m
minio-hl         ClusterIP    None         <none>            9000/TCP       13m
minio-console    LoadBalancer 10.43.86.196 192.168.1.198,... 9443:32153/TCP 13m
minio-log-hl-svc ClusterIP    None         <none>            5432/TCP       13m
minio-log-search-api
                 ClusterIP    10.43.33.82  <none>            8080/TCP       13m
minio-prometheus-hl-svc
                 ClusterIP    None         <none>            9090/TCP     9m30s

The 'minio' service provides access to applications, like Spark, for performing operations against the MinIO tenant object store. The service may be accessed on the displayed service port and cluster IP or domain name.

Tip

Kubernetes structures service URLs as: <service-name>.<namespace>.svc.<cluster-domain>:<service-port>. Thus, if the cluster domain is 'cluster.local' and the MinIO service is in the 'minio' namespace, the service URL would be: 'minio.minio.svc.cluster.local:443'.

Warning

Except for the '*-console' service, all other services support MinIO tenant operations and are not intended for consumption by users or administrators.

7.2 Connect as an external client #

 

By default, external applications cannot access the MinIO tenant.

With SUSE Rancher, you can set up either load balancers or ingress controllers to redirect service requests. Load balancers can only handle one IP address per service, while ingress works with one or more ingress controllers to dynamically route service requests.

It is recommended that you configure your cluster with an ingress.

Note

Ingress and ingress controllers residing in RKE-launched clusters are powered by NGINX.

Below is a sample ingress resource for MinIO:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: ingress-minio
  namespace: tenant1-ns
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: "nginx"
    ## Remove if using CA signed certificate
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-ssl-verify: "off"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/backend-protocol: "HTTPS"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: "0"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/server-snippet: |
      client_max_body_size 0;
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/configuration-snippet: |
      chunked_transfer_encoding off;
spec:
  tls:
  - hosts:
      - minio.example.com
    secretName: nginx-tls
  rules:
  - host: minio.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: minio
            port:
              number: 443

Warning

S3 signature protocols require preserving HTTP headers. The nginx configuration must keep any HTTP headers as-is to ensure successful connectivity.

Integration into S3 has become a standard feature even for Hadoop-based software like Spark and Presto. The S3A connector allows read/write directly to S3 buckets, and advances in the S3A connector have improved reliability and performance such that MinIO object storage can outperform HDFS on similar workloads. MinIO recommends using at least Spark 3.2.x and later with the corresponding 'hadoop-aws' library to access the most recent improvements to the S3A connector.

MinIO can act as the primary object storage resource for your AI/ML workloads, supporting migration from legacy HDFS onto your Kubernetes deployment. The MinIO Operator ensures a Kubernetes-native experience for deploying and managing MinIO tenants in support of AI/ML, in comparison to HDFS which has no native extensions and requires significant manual work to implement in a Kuberbetes context.

To connect Spark to a MinIO tenant, the S3A connector requires the following minimum settings:

# Set these as part of the Spark job configuration:

"spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.access.key" : "MINIO_USER"
"spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.secret.key" : "MINIO_PASSWORD
"spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.path.style.access" : "true"
"spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.endpoint" : "https://minio.example.net:9000"
"spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.ssl.enabled" : "true"
"spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.impl" : "org.apache.hadoop.fs.s3a.S3AFileSystem"
"spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.aws.credentials.provider" : "org.apache.hadoop.fs.s3a.SimpleAWSCredentialsProvider"

The 'spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.endpoint' must correspond to the MinIO tenant 'minio' service. If Spark operates within the Kubernetes cluster, you can specify the Kubernetes host name of the tenant 'service/minio'. If Spark operates external to the Kubernetes cluster, you must specify the ingress-backed URL for the service.

If both the MinIO Tenant and ingress operate without TLS, set 'spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.ssl.enabled' to 'false'.

The 's3a.access.key' and 's3a.secret.key' should correspond to a user on the MinIO tenant. You can create users as part of deploying the tenant. Use the MinIO Console to create additional users or connect the MinIO Client (mc) to the tenant to perform IAM operations.

MinIO has published examples of using Spark 3.2.x with PySpark against a MinIO deployment. You can find these and other examples in the MinIO Training Repository to guide your own testing and evaluation of Spark or other applications which implement S3A in connection with MinIO.

In this guide, you have explored the ease with which MinIO object storage can be deployed into your SUSE Rancher Kubernetes landscape for consumption by your cloud native applications through a consistent API across all infrastructure platforms.

Below are a few resources to help you continue your exploration of SUSE Rancher and MinIO:

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