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Minikv

Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API)

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Hi HN,I'm Emilie, I have a literature background (which explains the well-written documentation!) and I've been learning Rust and distributed systems by building minikv over the past few months. It recently got featured in Programmez! magazine: https://www.programmez.com/actualites/minikv-un-key-value-st...minikv is an open-source, distributed storage engine built for learning, experimentation, and self-hosted setups. It combines a strongly-consistent key-value database (Raft), S3-compatible object storage, and basic multi-tenancy.Features/highlights:- Raft consensus with automatic failover and sharding - S3-compatible HTTP API (plus REST/gRPC APIs) - Pluggable storage backends: in-memory, RocksDB, Sled - Multi-tenant: per-tenant namespaces, role-based access, quotas, and audit - Metrics (Prometheus), TLS, JWT-based API keys - Easy to deploy (single binary, works with Docker/Kubernetes)Quick demo (single node):```bash git clone https://github.com/whispem/minikv.git cd minikv cargo run --release -- --config config.example.toml curl localhost:8080/health/ready# S3 upload + read curl -X PUT localhost:8080/s3/mybucket/hello -d "hi HN" curl localhost:8080/s3/mybucket/helloDocs, cluster setup, and architecture details are in the repo. I’d love to hear feedback, questions, ideas, or your stories running distributed infra in Rust!Repo: https://github.com/whispem/minikv Crate: https://crates.io/crates/minikv

HN · launched Feb 3, 2026 · 71 upvotes (top 14%) · 0 views

Niche: database management systems and engines · 162 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -25% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Data infrastructure
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Building a distributed key-value store with Raft consensus and an S3-compatible API requires deep expertise in systems programming, concurrency, and distributed consensus edge cases.

What it would actually take: Requires Rust with tokio, raft-rs (or a custom state machine implementation), and an HTTP engine parsing AWS S3 signatures and XML/chunked transfer protocols. The hard parts are handling network partitions, split-brain scenarios, log compaction, snapshot distribution, and linearizable reads under concurrent failures. This demands specialized knowledge of distributed systems theory and rigorous deterministic simulation testing (like Jepsen or Madsim).

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: s3proxy, Garage, MinIO, Rclone

Concerns raised: Cannot commit files via GitHub web interface one at a time, Production systems need transparent one-file-per-object storage, Raft + 2PC may be overkill for simple object storage, Memory scaling with concurrent clients and transactions

Feature requests: Official Docker Hub image, OCI scratch base image, One-file-per-object storage backend

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 526 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #75 of 527 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 96 days after the earliest competitor.

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