Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API)
37 points
5 hours ago
| 5 comments
| github.com
| HN
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/hello

Docs, 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

iryna_kondr
9 minutes ago
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Hi Emilie, nice project, thanks for sharing. I’m curious whether there were any decisions that you added mainly for educational value even though you wouldn’t make the same call in a production system?
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frwickst
32 minutes ago
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forgotpwd16
7 minutes ago
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>All the code, architecture, logic, and design in minikv were written by me, 100% by hand.

Why people always lie with this? Especially in this case that they uploaded the entire log:

  Date:   Sat Dec 6 16:08:04 2025 +0100
      Add hashing utilities and consistent hash ring
  Date:   Sat Dec 6 16:07:24 2025 +0100
      Create mod.rs for common utilities in minikv
  Date:   Sat Dec 6 16:07:03 2025 +0100
      Add configuration structures for minikv components
  Date:   Sat Dec 6 16:06:26 2025 +0100
      Add error types and conversion methods for minikv
  Date:   Sat Dec 6 16:05:45 2025 +0100
      Add main module for minikv key-value store
And this goes on until project is complete (which probably took 2~3h total if sum all sessions). Doubt learned anything at all. Well, other than that LLMs can solo complete simple projects.

Comments in previous submission are also obviously AI generated. No wonder was flagged.

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eatonphil
45 minutes ago
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Great educational project! I'm curious why you are using Raft and also 2PC unless you're sharding data and doing cross-shard transactions? Or is Raft only for cluster membership but 2PC is for replicating data? If that's the case it kind of seems like overkill but I'm not sure.

Few distributed filesystems/object stores seem to use Raft (or consensus at all) for replicating data because it's unnecessary overhead. Chain replication is one popular way for replicating data (which uses consensus to manage membership but the data path is outside of consensus).

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kunley
53 minutes ago
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Looks nice.

What is the memory consumption under a significant load? That seems to be as much important as the throughput & latency.

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_s_a_m_
1 hour ago
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I there an official docker image? I am looking for something more light-weighted than MinIO. What are the requirements?
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flakron
56 minutes ago
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Have you checked garage - https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr ? Not affiliated nor trying to overshadow the posted project
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