Installation and Management
This section documents installing and managing the AGPLv3-licensed Silo object storage server on Kubernetes and bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure.
The minio executable, MINIO_* environment variables, S3 and Admin APIs, on-disk format, and MinIO Operator resource names are compatibility contracts. The prose uses the Silo brand, while commands and identifiers retain their compatible names.
Silo is an S3-compatible, software-defined distributed object storage server. The download page is the source of truth for currently published operating-system and architecture artifacts.
Silo uses Erasure Coding for object data. You can deploy it using one of the following topologies:
Single-Node Single-Drive (SNSD or “Standalone”)
Local development and evaluation with no/limited reliability
Single-Node Multi-Drive (SNMD or “Standalone Multi-Drive”)
Workloads with lower performance, scale, and capacity requirements
Drive-level reliability with configurable tolerance for loss of up to 1/2 all drives
Evaluation of multi-drive topologies and failover behavior.
Multi-Node Multi-Drive (MNMD or “Distributed”)
Enterprise-grade high-performance object storage
Multi Node/Drive level reliability with configurable tolerance for loss of up to 1/2 all nodes/drives
Primary storage for AI/ML, Distributed Query, Analytics, and other Data Lake components
Scalable for Petabyte+ workloads - both storage capacity and performance
Kubernetes
The archived MinIO Kubernetes Operator v7.1.1 can manage Tenant resources that run a Silo server image. The Operator, its charts, CRDs, and Tenant kind retain their upstream names; its upstream release lifecycle is now frozen.
These retained Operator guides describe a compatibility snapshot. The upstream repository was archived on 2026-03-20, so verify v7.1.1 against your Kubernetes distribution and override the Tenant image to pgsty/minio; the Silo project does not claim the former upstream vendor’s platform support matrix.
Baremetal
Silo can run on physical machines, virtualized hosts, or in a container. Consult the current download matrix and each platform page for the verified artifact and scope.
- Deploy Silo on Red Hat Linux
- Deploy Silo on Ubuntu Linux
- Deploy Silo as a Container
- Deploy Silo on macOS
- Deploy Silo on Windows
Important
Published artifacts do not establish equal production validation across platforms. Prefer a tested Linux or Kubernetes deployment for long-running workloads, pin exact package/image versions, and validate storage, failure domains, upgrade, and recovery behavior for the chosen topology.