Experimental Amazon S3 API support for Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Service

Some our community members have repeatedly asked for Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and MinIO integration [1] . B2 is competitively priced and has a huge fan following. We also heard from Backblaze team that they are actively expanding their B2 cloud storage service. We added experimental support for Backblaze B2 backend in MinIO to add S3 compatible API support for their B2 service.

MinIO internally translates all the incoming S3 API calls into equivalent B2 storage API calls, which means that all MinIO buckets and objects are stored as native B2 buckets and objects. S3 object layer is transparent to the applications which use S3 API. This way you can simultaneously use both Amazon S3 and B2 APIs without compromising any features.

Download pre-built binaries from

• Linux amd64 (https://data.minio.io:10000/minio-b2/linux-amd64/minio)
• MacOS amd64 (https://data.minio.io:10000/minio-b2/darwin-amd64/minio)

Source is available at https://github.com/minio/minio/pull/5002

Install on Linux amd64

wget https://data.minio.io:10000/minio-b2/linux-amd64/minio
chmod +x minio

Once you have downloaded the binary, please follow the guide to create an account on https://www.backblaze.com to obtain your account id and application key for B2 storage.

Start Minio Server

Once you have the account id and application key, export them as environment variables.

export MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=<your_b2_accound_id>
export MINIO_SECRET_KEY=<your_b2_application_key>
minio gateway b2

To test your setup, point your browser to http://localhost:9000. Use the same B2 credentials to login and access your data.

Command-line Access

Download MinIO client (mc) which provides a modern alternative to UNIX coreutils such as ls, cat, cp, mirror, diff etc. It supports filesystems and Amazon S3 compatible cloud storage services.

mc config host add myb2 http://localhost:9000 b2_account_id b2_application_key

Once you have configured mc , you can use subcommands like ls, cp, mirror to manage your data.

mc ls myb2
[2017-02-22 01:50:43 PST]     0B b2-bucket/
[2017-02-26 21:43:51 PST]     0B my-bucket/
[2017-02-26 22:10:11 PST]     0B test-bucket1/

SDK Access

MinIO supports lightweight SDKs for Amazon S3 compatible APIs. You may also use Amazon SDKs to access B2 via MinIO.

from minio import Minio
from minio.error import ResponseError

client = Minio('localhost:9000',
               access_key='b2_account_id',
               secret_key='b2_application_key',
               secure=False)

# Get a full object
try:
    data = client.get_object('my-bucketname', 'my-objectname')
    with open('my-testfile', 'wb') as file_data:
        for d in data.stream(32*1024):
            file_data.write(d)
except ResponseError as err:
    print(err)

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback via https://slack.minio.io or https://twitter.com/minio

Known Limitations

Backblaze B2 does not support CopyObject and CopyObjectPart API which is rarely used. Though it is possible to emulate this at MinIO layer using GetObject and PutObject it would incur additional costs for data transfer.

Edit

Backblaze B2 support is available now in MinIO master branch, please test with the latest code

docker run -p 9000:9000 --name azure-s3 \
 -e "MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=b2_accound_id" \
 -e "MINIO_SECRET_KEY=b2_application_key" \
 minio/minio:edge gateway b2