Brain Scans with promptObject API, AWS re:Invent and Why You Don’t Need ‘Special Buckets’: The January 2025 MinIO Newsletter

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to the first MinIO Newsletter of 2025.?

2024 was an incredible year for MinIO. We released AIStor, the most powerful version of MinIO to date. We attended 54 events around the world. We wrote and published over 150 blog articles. We won over 10 awards. And so much more… All of this wouldn’t be possible without the support of our amazing MinIO community. So, thank you.?

December delivered a slew of shows to end the year including AWS re:Invent and Gartner IOCS. Keith Pijanowski did a deep dive into the AWS sessions, watching more than 10 hours of presentations to get a clear sense of where AI and cloud computing are heading in 2025 and how Amazon is positioning itself to compete with giants like Microsoft, Google and Meta. Check it out.?

Also, how great did our team look in Vegas?!?

In honor of the New Year, we wrote a piece looking back at our top 10 most-read articles of 2024. We start with #10 and work our way up to first place. It’s a quick and easy read.?

The 2025 energy is in full swing here at MinIO. Let’s get into it.

The AI Corner

The AI Corner is all about AIStor this month.?

AJ explores the network configurations that allow you to set up AIStor with various replication strategies and network topologies, ensuring efficient data storage and access across multiple AIStor deployments. The process is streamlined, so there's no need for complex setups like Bonded or Dual NICs, which can introduce additional overhead.?

AIStor’s Prompt API revolutionizes interaction with unstructured healthcare data by leveraging natural language processing with scalable, reliable object storage. It simplifies workflows, accelerates insights and enhances patient care. From analyzing medical records to supporting clinical decisions, the API empowers healthcare professionals to turn raw data into actionable knowledge, driving improved outcomes for patients and providers.?

Keeping systems running is non-negotiable, and timely updates—especially for security—are critical. Yet, updates often risk downtime or disruptions. AIStor solves this with sub-second restart times and non-disruptive upgrades, even at scale. This ensures your data storage remains secure and operational without interruptions, supporting critical workflows and minimizing risk. In this post, we outline how AIStor delivers seamless updates to meet the demands of modern enterprises.

AWS recently introduced Amazon S3 Tables, aimed at tackling the challenges of storing and querying tabular data in the cloud. However, these challenges stem from limitations within AWS's own infrastructure, not object storage as a whole. This article explains why AIStor users don’t need “special buckets” to optimize their data lakehouse.

In a previous piece, Keith introduced the S3 Connector for Pytorch and described the problem it intends to solve in detail. In this article, Keith builds on his previous piece by focusing on iterable-style datasets. The documentation for this connector only shows examples of loading data from Amazon S3—here Keith shows you how to use it against MinIO.?

And last but not least, your favorite part of last month’s newsletter was theCUBE’s interview with Anand Babu Periasamy and Sanjeev Mohan hosted by the wonderful Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay . So let’s run it back.?

The Customer Corner

Last month we unveiled the Customer Corner. We love our customers and the incredible ways they use MinIO to transform their business, so we thought they deserved their own section.?

EXNESS is a global leader in online trading, recognized for its transparency, technological innovation and customer-centric approach. Its trading platform generates and processes petabytes of data, requiring a cutting-edge infrastructure to ensure seamless operations. Tune into this new podcast to hear from Dmitriy Alexandrov , DBA Team Leader at Exness, who reveals how MinIO enables Exness to handle massive data volumes and deliver lightning-fast trading experiences.?

Dmitry shares insights about Exness’ data challenges, its decision to move from cloud to an on-prem infrastructure with MinIO and how MinIO has become central to their AI/ML workloads and disaster recovery.

Mark Clark , CEO of Parsec Labs , illustrates the value he has realized with MinIO's high-performance object storage in a new podcast. The conversation dives into Parsec Lab’s proven success around replication, data consolidation and data migration.?

In addition to being a source and destination for their data mobility appliance, Parsec Labs also relies on MinIO to capture telemetry data and phone home logs from all its appliances distributed worldwide at customer sites. Each appliance has its own bucket in a centrally installed instance of MinIO in Parsec’s data center, and each appliance sends data to its bucket. Parsec tried other storage solutions, but they tended to fill up when it wasn’t convenient.

Bits and Bytes

ICYMI - We recently announced our strategic partnership with F5 , the global leader in multicloud application security and delivery. This powerful collaboration integrates MinIO's cutting-edge, scalable storage solutions with F5's high-performance traffic management and security technologies to enhance AI workloads—especially at exascale levels where we have one very famous customer together doing pioneering work in the AI space. Together, we address unique challenges of large-scale AI deployments by providing optimized data flow, robust security and seamless hybrid and multicloud networking.?

Moving on...?

The talented Adrian Bridgwater takes on the subject of the private cloud and repatriation in this well-researched piece and discussion with Lawrence O'Connor . The modern private cloud is the cloud you control—from a performance, security and cost perspective.

Asen Velchov of AlphaVPS wrote a simple and sleek look into getting started with MinIO, including a brief overview, why MinIO and how to get started.?

Vrinda Hedge on Medium demos how to set up Velero on Minikube using MinIO as object storage. Vrinda uses Velero to create a backup of the resources in the Minikube. Data stored using MinIO.?

Data Engineer Edilson Athayde Junior performs the ingestion of data from a PostgreSQL database into MinIO using Apache Spark.?

This is officially our first YouTube short featured in Bits and Bytes! ‘AlexK1919’ on YouTube shows you how to automate file transfers from Dropbox to MinIO using n8n, a workflow automation tool.?

Julien Cartigny ?? posted on Linkedin about some GCP alternatives, including MinIO.?

Engineer Sameer Shaik posted a Linkedin article on performing DML operations on Apache Iceberg tables in Jupyter Notebook with MinIO.?

Software Engineer & Full Stack Specialist Nijat Aliyev uploaded a YouTube tutorial showing how to create a powerful file management server using Node.js and MinIO.

Data Consultant Armaan Gohil posted his datalake architecture stack on LinkedIn using MinIO for S3-compatible object storage.

2025 is off to a great start! Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. See you next month.?

The MinIO Team?