A Redesigned Global Console for AI-Centric Workloads

The MinIO Console has been an evolving product for several years now. Every time we learn, we think about how to improve this incredibly important part of our interaction framework. First came the Console, which saw massive adoption within a year of its introduction. More than 10K organizations to be more specific.Next came the enterprise Console. That moved from the 1:1 relationship between the object store and its GUI to a 1 to many relationship. The proverbial single pane of glass. 

With the AIStor release, we have another massive step function improvement. 

The AIStor Global Console is the ultimate UI for developers and administrators alike. It bridges the gap between tenant flexibility and granularity when it comes to managing your MinIO object storage efficiently while simultaneously offering access to powerful new features. In addition to providing the tooling to create buckets, access policies, among a host of other things, the new Global Console takes the burden of many of the lower level cluster operations.

These are just a subset of features that we’ve shown that AIStor supports. In subsequent blogs we’ll delve much deeper into some of the functions to show you some additional features.

Kubernetes First

The Global Console is Kubernetes first. That doesn’t mean you cannot run bare metal, it just means that we default to assume Kubernetes based on the deployment distributions that we see for commercial customers.The key here is that we are pushing a post-YAML world. Everything you would configure in your YAML you can configure in the GUI. Guess what, you can also export that as a YAML when you are done in case your devops brethren want to use that for automation. The following are some of the features that are now available via the UI.

• Load Balancer for managing traffic across the cluster.
• Inbound Traffic rules so object access can be gated at a granular level.
• Storage Class for Kubernetes
  • Update Object Store
  • Delete Object Store

Bare Metal Console

As you already know, MinIO supports deployment on any type of environment whether it’d be VM, Edge, IoT, bare metal among other systems where Kubernetes is not available. This allows storage infrastructure administrators to delegate access to application developers and object storage admins for things like setting up buckets, access control, lifecycle management and replication to name a few. 

Batch Jobs

Batch jobs bring the capability to move or modify large amounts of data in simple and concise strategy. This offloads the responsibility from the client to the server to move the data at the highest throughput possible. With Batch jobs you can ask MinIo to replicate entire buckets, for example when setting up an edge MinIO, you can use the Batch functionality to push the data sets to a new location. 

Please take a look below at how you can set up your own batch job via the UI.

Prompt API

The addition of the promptObject API to the Global Console is a little sprinkle of magic. It allows the user to interact with the contents of an object using modern LLM interfaces (aka a text box). Simply identify the object you want to interact with and begin the inquisition. For example, you can ask questions from a 500 page research paper or an image. This runs on your own infrastructure and you can use MinIO’s multi-modal LLM or by using APIs from OpenAI or Anthropic to name a few.  While we expect that vast majority of usage to be from the API and used by applications - this is a powerful addition to Global Console. 

The Power of a Single Pane of Glass

One of the great features of the redesigned Global Console is the ability to see the entirety of your MinIO deployments from a single pane of glass and to interact with them accordingly. 

Let’s look at the AIStor console, which is the portal you’ll use, so to speak, to connect with MinIO when it's launched via Kubernetes. Here is a short demo on how that would look like.

Keeping it simple

The overarching goal of the redesign is to drive more simplicity and power into the GUI. It has become the daily driver for our customer base - even the diehard CLI types. We continue to pack more and more features into the AIStor and that creates challenges along the simplicity front - a subject on which we are obsessive. 

This redesign achieves this while leaving ourselves a lot of room to grow without the console getting too cluttered, by surfacing the relevant information to be easily visible and more granular information at most 1 click away.

We encourage you to reach out and get a demo - we think you will be duly impressed.