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Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API)

submitted by whispe+(OP) on 2026-01-17 19:39:36 | 35 points 39 comments
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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


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6. esafak+I3[view] [source] 2026-01-17 20:06:45
>>whispe+(OP)
If you are really interested in this subject, you might want to read https://dataintensive.net/

If you clarify what your goals are, broadly speaking, maybe we can give advice.

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9. the-la+L4[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-01-17 20:14:53
>>whispe+J3
https://github.com/whispem/minikv/blob/main/src/coordinator/...

Nice, you are the first person I have seen who cares to type in unicode arrow instead of "->" in comments.

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11. the-la+C6[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-01-17 20:28:46
>>whispe+o5
Ok, let me call you out more explicitly. It is clear that most of the code is not written by you. Commit history shows that first a large feature appears out of the blue, then you have a followup series of commits removing "useless" comments (left by LLM). Quite a few useless comments are still there.

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.

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25. cannon+td[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-01-17 21:10:11
>>whispe+J3
You left behind a script clearly written by your LLM tool that patched some problems in your code. It's undeniable.

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....

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34. tfaria+tj3[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-01-19 01:28:19
>>whispe+J3
Was CONTRIBUTING.md also authored with the help of AI tools?

I can see a "YOUR_USERNAME" placeholder was removed in this commit: https://github.com/whispem/minikv/commit/eda60aa154a1293d981....

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