[Development Update] Decentralized High Performance Object Storage (MinIO)

Ecosystem
1

We wanted to provide an update on the development status of the treasury-funded Referenda #1503 - Decentralized High Performance Object Storage (MinIO). As outlined in the full proposal, the goal is to develop a proof of concept that uses the industry-standard storage implementation MinIO to make Acurast’s phone-based decentralized cloud storage accessible to individuals and enterprises alike.

The following key deliverables were initially outlined:

  • MVP integration of MinIO object storage in Acurast’s decentralized compute environment
  • Creation of storage buckets and configurable access control
  • Configuration and development to make MinIO exposable through Acurast’s native P2P layer
  • Benchmarking of required replications and estimated costs per GB of storage on Acurast’s network
  • Testing and detailed developer documentation with examples of how to access MinIO in Acurast’s compute environment

Current Development Status

Phase 1

The first phase of the defined milestones has been successfully completed:

  1. Requirements engineering
  2. Development of the MinIO–Acurast integration PoC: With this PoC, Acurast Processors (phone-powered compute providers) can now extend their storage in a way compatible with the MinIO standard.

Phase 2

The second phase, currently in development, focuses on replicating storage buckets across multiple Processors in the Acurast network to make storage resilient to downtime or offline incidents of individual Processors. This is achieved by utilizing Acurast’s native peer-to-peer (P2P) communication layer, where Processors in a specific deployment (e.g., a storage bucket deployment across 10 Processors) can communicate fully encrypted with each other to create replications and make the storage bucket accessible for the developer.

Currently, the MinIO implementation has been completed at an alpha stage, but this surfaced the need for optimization in the Acurast P2P layer to drastically increase its reliability, making it suitable for production deployments of MinIO storage buckets on Acurast.

The current outstanding milestones are:

  1. Replication over Acurast’s native P2P network
  2. Storage cost benchmarking
  3. Developer documentation