Document specifics of NAS gateway

[straight-shoota]

From the available documentation it is not clear what is the difference between minio server /path and minio gateway Nas /path.

I would appreciate if someone could explain this and enhance the docs accordingly.

[harshavardhana]

NAS gateway is documented here

• https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/docs/gateway/nas.md
• https://minio.io/nas.html
• https://docs.minio.io/docs/minio-gateway-for-nas

[straight-shoota]

Thanks, but I am aware of these documentation sites. However, I can't find any information there (or in any issues here on Github) how exactly minio server and minio gateway nas differ. It is my understanding that they behave pretty similar, but not exactly the same. #5569 suggests that for example, but doesn't state specifics.

[harshavardhana]

Thanks, but I am aware of these documentation sites. However, I can't find any information there (or in any issues here on Github) how exactly minio server and minio gateway nas differ. It is my understanding that they behave pretty similar, but not exactly the same. #5569 suggests that for example, but doesn't state specifics.

minio server /path 

and

minio gateway nas /path

Currently, they share the same code base so also behave the same. But NAS gateway if necessary would diverge eventually from minio server /path. The reason we are not explaining is also that there is no difference from an application point of view. Both speak S3 APIs and both behave the same for S3 API operations.

[deekoder]

@straight-shoota if you want high-level details, architecture etc, you could also go here https://minio.io/nas.html @straight-shoota when you run minio in the server mode, minio is your object storage, which is a full blown server and speaks S3 protocol.

When you use minio in the gateway mode, you can speak S3 and park your objects on any nas backend. You can also use regular POSIX to access your data apart from S3. It depends on your usecase which path you want to take. Let us know if we can help in any other way.

[straight-shoota]

Thanks for clarifying that 👍

If I understand you both correctly, server and gateway nas are similar and only differ in the semantics of data ownership: server expects that the data path is governed by minio exclusively while gateway nas is aware that the data is on a remote storage and may be accessed and changed by different means. However, this semantic difference doesn't matter practically, because both commands are doing exactly the same thing (but might change in the future?).

For my specific use case I'm considering to make selected buckets (or the entire data path of a tenant) available via FTP as legacy support (allowing read and write access).

[deekoder]

@straight-shoota correct. Great. I will close this issue as working as intended. Please feel free to come over to our slack channel https://slack.minio.io/ and come chat with us there. We hang there a lot and can answer questions instantly.

[zhangyoufu]

minio gateway nas requires MINIO_ACCESS_KEY & MINIO_SECRET_KEY being specified via environment variable. And minio gateway nas does not support multiple user.

[harshavardhana]

Minio gateway nas supports multi user with etcd configured.

[lock]

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.