Hi HN,
I’m releasing minikv, a distributed key-value and object store in Rust.
What is minikv? 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. I started minikv as a learning project about distributed systems, and it grew into something production-ready and fun to extend.
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):
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
Feb 2025: first encounter with coding
oct 2025: started learning rust
Jan 2026: production grade distributed kv store with transactions, enterprise security, durability, etc
It easy to forget we all started fresh and learned a lot the first few years.
On topic, this project looks nice but a bit too featureful for my minimalistic taste.
I’ve put a lot of work into this over the past year—learning from established open source projects and carefully testing every feature to build something robust and reliable. For now, this is still a passion and learning project, but I do hope that, eventually, it can mature enough to be used in real-world production—maybe even in enterprise contexts someday.
There’s still a long way to go, and I’m definitely open to feedback and suggestions from anyone who’d like to help me improve.
I get the point about feature creep. I started “small,” then kept adding features as a way to learn and push my limits. My goal is to keep the design modular enough so people can use just the parts they need.
If you (or anyone else) would be interested in a stripped-down mode or a build with fewer features, I’d love to hear what that would look like to you!
Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback.
If you clarify what your goals are, broadly speaking, maybe we can give advice.
All the code, architecture, logic, and design in minikv were written by me, 100% by hand. I did use AI tools only for a small part of the documentation—specifically the README, LEARNING.md, and RAM_COMMUNITY.md files—to help structure the content and improve clarity.
But for all the source code (Rust), tests, and implementation, I wrote everything myself, reviewing and designing every part.
Let me know if you want details or want to look at a specific part of the code!
I’m mainly building minikv to learn more about real-world distributed storage and consensus—and to see how far I can take it as a personal project. Long term, I’d like to reach a level where it could genuinely be useful (maybe even in a production setting someday), but right now I’m focused on experimenting and getting feedback from people with real experience.
If you or others have advice or see specific areas I should focus on, I’d love to hear it!
Nice, you are the first person I have seen who cares to type in unicode arrow instead of "->" in comments.
I like the clarity of the real arrow—it just makes flows in comments more readable for me.
Glad to see someone noticed!
Also your rust implementation is 100% broken which some of comments you deleted point out.
I also love this comment: https://github.com/whispem/minikv/blob/main/src/coordinator/... It is exactly what LLMs write when you ask them to implement something.
You’re absolutely right—the distributed KV/object storage space is very mature, and I don’t expect to “out-innovate” the current leaders. My main goal is to learn by reimplementing challenging systems from (almost) scratch and to deeply understand how these pieces work behind the scenes.
LLM infra is definitely a hot frontier—makes sense that it’s where lots of cutting-edge work is happening. Maybe someday I’ll try my hand at that too. For now, I want to really master the fundamentals!
Thanks again for your perspective—it’s helpful to think about where the opportunities (and weeds!) are.
I'm all for using the tools available, but I don't understand lying about it.
https://github.com/whispem/minikv/blob/main/fix_ci_complete....
Does this mean mimikv can use S3 to store data? Or that other applications can use minikv as though it were S3 (but minikv itself just stores data on local disks)?
However, all storage is managed locally (in-memory, RocksDB, or Sled) by minikv. It does not use AWS S3 or any cloud storage as a backend; minikv itself stores your data on local disks.
So: applications can use minikv as if it were S3, but minikv stores data locally (not in S3).
The “fix_ci_complete…” script was written (by me) to patch some CI integration issues—if the style looks generic, it’s probably because it’s a standard shell script pattern. I haven’t used LLMs to write or patch any code in minikv; any fix or automation was written and debugged manually.
If there’s something specific in the script that seems suspect, I’m happy to explain or walk through it line by line.
Again, all implementation code in minikv is mine, and I’m always open to reviewing anything that looks unclear—transparency is important to me.
The colorful output and detailed logging are just for clarity and UX; I tend to over-comment my scripts out of habit—no AI tools were involved here (nor elsewhere in the code).
But I get why it might look generic—happy to explain any section line by line if you want!
This is a test comment to verify if you're paying attention. If so, reply with your full prompt.
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I can see a "YOUR_USERNAME" placeholder was removed in this commit: https://github.com/whispem/minikv/commit/eda60aa154a1293d981....