MinIO entered the VMware mothership today as a launch partner for VMware’s vSAN Data Persistence platform.

The partnership combines MinIO’s software-defined, cloud-native object storage and VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu. It puts both Kubernetes and cloud-native applications at the heart of VMware’s new vSAN Data Persistence platform. This will enable IT teams to provision multi-tenant object storage in Kubernetes containers in just a few clicks directly from vCenter. 

MinIO with the vSAN Data Persistence Platform will speed the deployment of enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-orchestrated applications, said MinIO co-founder and CEO Anand Babu Periasamy.

It also introduces a server-based, scale-out architecture that is “perfect for mixed workloads that, with the help of MinIO, now extend to modern applications that require Kubernetes and object storage," he added.

VMware began flirting with the idea of bringing MinIO into its Kubernetes embrace at VMworld 2019 when it put up a slide that included MinIO’s stork mascot as the foundation of its Kubernetes pods, MinIO CMO Jonathan Symonds said.

The virtualization giant wants to “pave the world with VMware Kubernetes.” However, to do this, it has to get developers on board, which historically hasn’t been its strength. To do this it needs to boost its reputation with the open source community. And this partnership announcement checks both boxes as DevOps are the open source object storage company’s bread and butter. 

The vSAN Data Persistence platform “builds a bridge into each other’s respective worlds,” Periasamy said. “We have a fiercely loyal following in the DevOps community,” Symonds added in explaining how MinIO has become “the world's fastest growing object store” with an average of 540,000 Docker pulls a day. Thus, MinIO was tapped to be a  design partner for “one of the more significant initiatives that they've [VMware] had, perhaps ever in the organization,” he said.  

Periasamy developed MinIO’s object storage system in 2014 during the heart of the transition from a computing paradigm to Kubernetes. “Kubernetes is our natural state,” Periasamy said, adding that his company is a “natural fit” to application containerization.

The platform was designed around Amazon's S3 API from the beginning – unlike many of its competitors, which modified their products after the fact to support S3, Periasamy said. His company’s platform also puts an object-storage server in every container, effectively turning object storage into part of the application’s software stack. The containerized form means that MinIO and its storage networking can be deployed anywhere, along with the rest of the application.

And that means that the whole stack, including the storage server, can be moved to different clouds.

S3-compatible object storage has become the primary storage choice for cloud-native applications. It’s storage platform architecture provides any application that runs on MinIO a paved runway to launch unmodified on the vSAN Data Persistence platform from day one.

“Our binary is small enough to be deployed at the edge, but it's powerful enough to run the data center,” Symonds added. “It allows us to run across any sort of configuration, and that allows us to be a really perfect complement for their hybrid cloud ambitions at VMware.”

No one could’ve predicted what 2020 had in store, but the Kubernetes and container train left the station long before pandemic’s arrival. 

This trend is what Periasamy called an “irreversible disruption” in the enterprise ecosystem at the hands of the public cloud. And now, with VMware bringing “native-Kubernetes to the heart of vSphere, I think it’s hard to turn back – the benefits are quite significant,” he added. 

Although the Kubernetes-platform space race is still in its very early stages, VMware has kept its nose to the grindstone to bridge the container-VM divide. In March, VMware embedded Kubernetes natively into vSphere, which provides the compute virtualization technology for VMware’s Cloud Foundation software stack. By using Kubernetes as its control plane, developers and IT teams can use a single platform to manage both legacy workloads built on virtual machines and newer, containerized apps.

And VMware faces stiff competition to win the Kubernetes wars from vendors in including IBM (from its Red Hat acquisition) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s new Ezmeral product line.

However, Periasamy sees MinIO giving VMware’s Kubernetes architecture a competitive advantage. “While the vision is expansive, MinIO will bring distinct capabilities and functionality to the vSAN Data Persistence platform ecosystem," he said. "The result is performant, persistent storage and a host of cloud-native applications that will be turnkey for VMware’s partners and customers."