AIStor’s promptObject API, GPU Trends and the new Customer Corner: The December 2024 MinIO Newsletter

MinIO was on the nice list this year, and we got our present early. The AIStor launch was a huge success. 

In case you missed it, AIStor reflects the accelerated learning curve we have been on over the past few quarters as we solve AI/ML-class problems at exascale. It is the most powerful version of MinIO to date.  

The types of challenges that occur north of 100 PiB are totally different from those you experience at 10 PiB and the challenges at 1 EiB and above are different still. AIStor has several slick new features that we’ve specifically engineered for our customers: promptObject, S3 over RDMA, AIHub and an updated Global Console. We strongly encourage you to reach out and get a demo. We are confident you will be blown away.  

The AIStor launch has generated a lot of amazing press. Let’s dive into some of the articles: 

Philippe NICOLAS , one of the smartest storage analysts in the business, covers the AIStor release in this excellent installment of the StorageNewsletter. He immediately grasped the power of promptObject.  

The esteemed Chris Mellor from Blocks and Files covers the core pillars of AIStor in his article—promptObject, S3 over RDMA and AIHub. 

Alex Woodie from BigDATAwire strikes again with his article on our pivot to AI with the launch of AIStor. As usual, Alex does an impeccable job of recognizing the crux of who we are at MinIO and how we’ve evolved to create the most powerful version of MinIO to date, purpose-built for AI/ML workloads. 

We were lucky enough to be at KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City during the launch of AIStor, meaning we got the chance to meet up with our friends Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay from SiliconANGLE & theCUBE to talk about the new groundbreaking features. Check out Anand Babu Periasamy 's interview here and Daniel Valdivia 's interview here.  

Sanjeev Mohan wrote an incredible piece about AIStor after witnessing the initial unveiling at KubeCon. Sanjeev covers everything from MinIO’s history and use cases to new AIStor features and ecosystem integration. 

There are many more incredible articles out there on the launch of AIStor. Check out our Linkedin and X to see the rest of them. 

The AI Corner

With the release of AIStor, MinIO Engineer Sidharth Rajaram breaks down the new promptObject API. It’s now possible to summarize, talk to and ask questions about an object that is stored on MinIO with natural language. Sid explores a few use cases of this new API along with code examples.

A lot has changed in the past year when it comes to GPUs. NVIDIA unveiled a new chip architecture named after mathematician David Blackwell, while Intel Corporation and AMD have made progress with their competitive offerings, which they call accelerators. AI/ML SME Keith Pijanowski has a lot to say on the topic. In this article, Keith breaks down how introducing GPUs affects your data infrastructure and what you can do to maximize your investment in GPUs. 

ICYMI: There are a few articles from the last couple of months that our audience has been loving. Just in case you missed them, we’ve got you covered: 

Tesla recently made waves by announcing the open-sourcing of its Tesla Transport Protocol over Ethernet (TTPoE), a cutting-edge network fabric designed for high-speed, low-latency data transport in AI/ML data center environments. This aligns with Tesla’s history of using open-source strategies to drive industry progress, encouraging other companies to follow suit. 

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again… the cloud is an operating model, not a physical location. That is why you will find MinIO everywhere—on the public cloud, on the private cloud, at the edge. We don’t differentiate, and because we are cloud-native, we are cloud-agnostic. We break down the building blocks of the cloud operating model here. 

The cloud once held the promise of unlimited scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. However, the rise of gen AI has brought an unexpected shock for many organizations: cloud bills soaring to unprecedented levels. And now… onto something new.

The Customer Corner

Welcome to the Customer Corner, the latest addition to our newsletter! We love our customers and the incredible ways they use MinIO to transform their business, so we thought they deserved their own section. I mean, we did just build a cutting-edge new suite of features based on their growing needs… MinIO customers continue to select MinIO as their preferred choice for high-performance object storage. Here are a few examples where MinIO customers share their object storage success stories:  

Mobile app leaders like Uber and Bank of America chose Kobiton to maximize mobile apps impact. Kobiton chose MinIO to maximize performance and fault tolerance to meet their object storage requirements. Tune in to this new podcast to uncover the details behind Kobiton's success story. 

The second podcast dives into Microblink ’s journey to implement a cloud-native object storage solution. Microblink required a seamless way to manage data used for training machine learning models and deliver against performance objectives. MinIO not only addressed these requirements but yielded a 62% cost savings.

This new case study explores how MinIO helped a leading educational services organization reduce costs, boost performance and scale efficiently to support AI and data lakehouse initiatives. The case study breaks down how the customer embarked on a mission to transform its IT infrastructure, integrating AI and modernizing its systems to better support national-scale operations. With a need for fast, scalable storage that integrates seamlessly into their infrastructure, the organization selected MinIO as the foundation for its data strategy. 

Before we move on to our awesome Bits and Bytes section, we had to share some fun photos from our favorite event of the year—KubeCon! Great to connect with everyone in SLC. 

Bits and Bytes

Ready for your presents? Chandra Sekhar over on Medium takes you through a simple guide on how to set up MinIO using Docker in just a few steps. 

Software Engineer Eduardo Santos explores how to integrate AWS S3 using MinIO with a NestJS application to automate and manage bucket policies. 

Useme Alehosaini, MBA, MSc ’s article includes why MinIO, how to install MinIO using Docker as well as C# code snippets. 

Looking to build a scalable data warehouse without breaking the bank? Leandro Aeschlimann highlights the power of open source in his Linkedin post—featuring MinIO, of course. 

Staying on the Linkedin train, Guilherme Antunes also features MinIO in his open source data stack. 

DevOps Engineer Atiq khan wrote a Linkedin post about implementing MinIO in a local environment: “This experience reinforced the value of open-source technologies like MinIO in modern infrastructure. For anyone looking to explore scalable and secure storage, MinIO is worth checking out!” Thanks Atiq! 

Steve McDowell from NAND Research wrote an amazing article about AIStor, writing, “While designed for AI/ML workloads, AIStor’s features enhance other applications, including advanced analytics, data lakehouses, Hadoop replacements, and backup systems.” Well worth your time. 

KubeCon was a huge success for the MinIO team… and we had tons of fun. Great to see Victoria G. from siliconANGLE’s KubeCon roundup piece feature the release of AIStor and AB’s take on it. 

Enjoy the holiday season, everyone. Thank you for tuning in, and we’ll see you next month!