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Once again Keith and I are talking K8s storage, only this time it was object storage. Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, Co-founder and CEO of MinIO, has been on our show a couple of times now and its always an insightful discussion. He’s got an uncommon perspective on IT today and what needs to change.

Although MinIO is an open source, uber-compatible, S3 object store, AB more often talks like a revolutionary, touting the benefits of containerization, scale and automation with K8s. Object storage is just one of the vehicles to help get there. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

We started our discussion on the changing role of object storage in applications. Object storage started out as an archive solution. But then, over time, something happened, modern database startups adopted object storage to hold primary data, then analytics moved over to objects in a big way, and finally AI/ML came out with an unquenchable thirst for data and object storage was its only salvation.

Keith questioned the use of objects in analytics. Both AB and I pointed out that Splunk (and Spark) fully supported objects. But Keith said R (and Python) data scientists prefer to use protocols they learned in school, and these were all about (CSV, JPEGs, JSON) files. AB said what usually happens is this data is stored as object storage and then downloaded onto local disk as files to be processed. That’s not to say, that R or Python can’t process objects directly, but when they don’t, the ultimate source of data truth is object storage.

Somehow, we got onto the multi-cloud question. AB said the multi-cloud is really all about containers and K8s. When customers talk multi-cloud, what they really mean is they want applications that can run anywhere, in any cloud, on premise, or anyplace else for that matter.

I thought multi cloud was a DR solution. But AB reiterated it’s more a solution to vendor lock-in. What containerization gives IT is the option (ability) to run applications anywhere, but IT is not obligated to execute that option unless it makes sense

AB said that dev today doesn’t develop apps in the cloud anymore. They develop locally using minikube, once it’s working there they then add CI/CD tool chains and then move it to its final resting place (the cloud or wherever it ultimately needs to run). It turns out, containers, YAML files, scripts etc. are small and trivial to upload, migrate, or move to any internet location. And with ubiquitous K8s support available everywhere, they can move anywhere unchanged.

But where’s the data. AB said anywhere the app executes. It’s never moved, it takes too much time and effort to move this amount of data. But as applications move, any data it generates grows in that location over time.

We next turned to how MinIO was supported in K8s. AB mentioned they have a DirectPV CSI driver that creates a distributed PV to support MinIO services on local disks. In this way, containers needing access to MinIO S3 object storage can directly allocate data to user storage.

Then we asked about opinionated stacks. AB said most customers don’t want these. They may have some value in preserving an infrastructure environment but they’re better off transitioning to containerization and build any stack within those containers and the K8s cluster services.

On the other hand, MinIO object storage is available with the same S3 API, in bare metal, on VMware, OpenShift, K8s, every public cloud and most private clouds, as well. The advantage of the same, single storage interface, available everywhere can’t be beat.

MinIO recently closed a new funding round of $103M. AB mentioned they had new investments from Intel and Softbank, but I was more interested in plans he had for the new cash. And Keith asked where the new funding left MinIO with respect to its competitors in this space.

AB said it was never about the money, it was more about what you did with your team that mattered in the long run. AB’s imperative was to enter an existing market with a better product and succeed with that. Creating a new market plus a new product always cost more, takes longer and is riskier.

As for the new funds, there are really two ways to go: 1) improve the current product or 2) create a new one. My sense is that AB leans towards improving the current product.

For instance, MinIO is often asked to support a different object storage API. But AB’s perspective is that S3 was an early bet that paid off well by becoming the de facto standard for object storage. Supporting another API would divide his resources and probably make their current product worse not better. AB mentioned they are getting 1.1M downloads of their Docker container version so they seem to be succeeding well with the current product

AB Periasamy is the co-founder and CEO of MinIO, an open-source provider of high performance, object storage software. In addition to this role, AB is an active investor and advisor to a wide range of technology companies, from H2O.ai and Manetu where he serves on the board to advisor or investor roles with Humio, Isovalent, Starburst, Yugabyte, Tetrate, Postman, Storj, Procurify, and Helpshift. Successful exits include Gitter.im (Gitlab), Treasure Data (ARM) and Fastor (SMART).

AB co-founded Gluster in 2005 to commoditize scalable storage systems. As CTO, he was the primary architect and strategist for the development of the Gluster file system, a pioneer in software defined storage. After the company was acquired by Red Hat in 2011, AB joined Red Hat’s Office of the CTO. Prior to Gluster, AB was CTO of California Digital Corporation, where his work led to scaling of the commodity cluster computing to supercomputing class performance. His work there resulted in the development of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s “Thunder” code, which, at the time was the second fastest in the world.  

AB holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.