Just Getting Started: One Billion Docker Pulls...

When we started in late 2014, our stated goal was to be AWS S3, but for the rest of the world. Since then we have been working with a single focus to achieve that goal. Today marks a major milestone towards that goal, from zero lines of code in 2014 to a billion docker downloads with deployments across the globe.

To put this one billion docker downloads number in perspective, here are some some thoughts:

• MinIO is averaging just shy of one million pulls per day with peaks as high as 1.3 million.
• MinIO has added 330 million docker pulls over the last year alone
• That is, on average, 11 docker pulls a second
  

Those pulls don’t even account for other hubs (Quay.io for example) or private repositories, the real number is likely far higher but we count what we can measure directly.

There are other milestones of note too - we just passed 20,000 members of our public Slack community. This is a robust community of MinIO users who share our passion for cloud-native data stores - showing it each and every day with their questions and, perhaps more importantly, with their answers for other members of the community. It seems like just yesterday that we were building it - now it is its own, self-sustaining source of MinIO goodness.

There is also the GitHub Stars milestone. Here we just passed 35,000 stargazers - an unbelievable number. To put it in context, that is the next open source object store.  

From the start we knew that storage has the attributes of a winner-take-all dynamic. This is unlike databases, where there is room for more players. Moreover, the storage landscape is characterized by legacy appliance approaches. We knew we need to change the rules of the game to win it.

MinIO, is, afterall, a software-defined storage play. No storage company has ever captured the developer mindset like MinIO has. No file store, no block store, no object store. Storage was dull, uninteresting and the purview of IT administrators. MinIO has made it a first class citizen as a data store - on par with databases (RDBMS, document, graph, time series, columnar, search engine), key value stores and analytics engines.

Other object stores never ascended to this level because they never aspired to be more. They were content to be appliances. They were content to be multi-protocol (thus elite at nothing). They were focused on cost at the expense of speed. They were focused on obscure features over simplicity. In effect, they sought to compete with the other vendors in the Gartner MQ for Distributed File and Object.

Problem was, AWS, GCP and Azure are not in that MQ and don’t play by those rules and have, in turn, routed the vendors who chose to play in that space.

Think about it for a second. If you are a developer and you have the choice between Hitachi Vantara or AWS, which would you choose? If the decision was between Dell ECS and Azure, what would you decide? The decision would be instantaneous. You would go with the one that fits the cloud operating model.

If the decision was between MinIO and GCP/AWS/Azure - there is a decision to be made. Why? Because they are functionally the same. Cloud-native, performant, Kubernetes-ready object stores.

Given that MinIO runs on any of the aforementioned clouds in addition to the private cloud and provides S3 API consistency for your application across all of them - well that is why architects choose MinIO, because they know that even if today they are not multi-cloud, that tomorrow they will be and that MinIO is the only way not to rewrite the application layer.

The point is that when it comes to modern object storage it is a pretty small selection pool. MinIO and the big three. That’s it. Only two of those are S3-compatible. AWS and MinIO.

MinIO aspired to be AWS S3 for the rest of the world. A billion Docker pulls is a major milestone on that journey.

More evidence can be found in the ecosystem. Every major database and analytics engine references MinIO as the standard when referring to “S3 compatible” storage. Even AWS. Take the MinIO challenge - go to Google and type in your favorite database/keyvalue store/analytics engine and MinIO. Either they have direct documentation, we have documentation or someone in the community has written a tutorial about it. From Apache Arrow to Zerto.

So celebrate the win with us. We are deeply humbled to have earned your trust and admiration and even more, your endorsement. Whether you starred us on GitHub, pulled us from Docker Hub or joined us on Slack - you are part of something bigger.

And that bigger is about to get even bigger still….