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Minikv

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

Details

External ID
46867947
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Minikv
Website domain
github.com
Launched
Feb. 3, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
71
Upvotes percentile
0.8618598382749326
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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

Enrichment

Theme
self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Data infrastructure
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
distributed key-value store with s3 api
Manually corrected
False

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 — 232 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #38 of 233 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 94 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a data infrastructure tool for Media & entertainment yet.