Glossary

Foreword

MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object store designed for modern, cloud-native infrastructures. With its simple API, excellent scalability and open source license, MinIO offers a flexible alternative to proprietary cloud storage - locally or in the cloud.

MinIO Console

MinIO calls your web interface the MinIO Console, which you can use to easily manage your MinIO instance.

Object management

Object

An object is binary data, such as images, audio files, spreadsheets or even binary executable code.

Bucket

A bucket can be compared to a directory or folder in a file system. It contains a collection of objects and offers optional functions such as versioning, locking objects or setting limits.

Identity and access management

Authentication

Authentication is the verification of a client's identity. MinIO requires the AWS Signature Version 4 Protocol here, but also supports the outdated AWS Signature Version 2 protocol.

Authorization

In MinIO, the term authorization refers to the restriction of actions and resources that an authenticated client has for deployment.

User

A MinIO user can be used for logging into the MinIO Console, among other things. Different policies can be assigned to each user. In addition, several access keys and the associated secret keys can also be created under one user.

Group

A group is a collection of users. Each group can be assigned one or more policies that explicitly list the actions and resources that group members may or may not access.

Access Keys

Access keys are child entities of an authenticated MinIO user, which inherit their policies from the user or the groups to which they belong. They are mainly used for setting up S3 clients and can also be used to define so-called inline policies that further restrict access to a subset of the actions and resources available to the parent user.

Secret Keys

A secret key is always associated with an explicit access key and acts as a password for the respective client. This must always be kept secret.

API domain

The API domain is the domain via which MinIO buckets can be managed.

Admin domain

The MinIO Console is operated under the admin domain.