While I commend the developers of Minio for building what appears to be a functional S3-API-compatible system in Go Lang it seems to me to be missing the key thing that makes S3 a compelling object/data storage solution -- the distributed part. Meaning, while I see that a Minio developer (y4m4b4) talks about erasure coding, something when talking about AWS/S3 normally refers to the way data is encoded and replicated across nodes to mitigate outright data loss as well as bit rot, their description states "You may lose roughly half the number of drives..." -- "drives" not "systems" or "nodes". This appears to be a single node solution, or have I overlooked the documentation describing how to join nodes together into a cluster? The description given is much more akin to RAID, which is fine and useful for distributing data across disks connected to a single system.

I hope that this is just an early announcement of a thing that is going to mature into a fully distributed solution, or that it is made clear that this is like SQLite (Minio is to AWS/S3 as SQLite is to RDBMS systems [PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.]) -- something intended to be smaller in scope and single node only. Leaving this fuzzy will lead to many people being confused and potentially someone depending on this system and later dealing with massive data loss when their drive or drives fail.

Could the developers of Minio please make a statement as to which direction they intending on going? Is this a single node S3-API compatible solution (which is valuable for a specific class of problems) or something that will eventually be designed to store data across 10s/100s/1000s of nodes geographically distributed all working together to maintain some degree of availability and data integrity?

What's Minio going to be when it grows up? a) S3Lite b) S3