@mholt It does not matter if Caddy is open source or proprietary. Showing advertisements in the HTTP response header field is an annoyance. Please remove "Minio" from the header.
I am also sad about how the opensource version of Caddy project no longer has a website and being ignored. -ab
Minio shards data across 16 drives. If you have more drives, you would run multiple instances for each set of 16 drives. I would generally recommend against denser storage servers. When it goes down, all the drives go offline with it.
Minio is designed to work in conjunction with Kubernetes and Mesos like external orchestrators. GlusterFS, Ceph and Swift has builtin orchestration. So when you measure Minio's scalability, you should measure Kubernetes instead.
Multi-tenant cloud-native architecture requires each tenant to be intentionally kept small (limited by the failure domain). This way, when you scale from few hundred tenants to millions, your complexity doesn't scale proportionately. Million'th instance of Minio is as simple as its first instance. If you are looking for a global namespace, simply use ngnix like proxy load-balancers in the front. Orchestration tools are well understood at scale unlike Ceph and Swift.
Building monolithic distributed systems has a number of challenges. They do not scale beyond a point. Failure may take down the entire site. Troubleshooting is hard. No CI/CD. Entire system has to be upgraded at once with planned downtime. Security breach exposes the whole system..
Minio is deliberately designed this way. Cloud native applications require strict multitenancy. Minio's approach is to build just enough to meet a single tenant's requirement. Deploy one minio server per tenant or user or customer .. whichever fits you the best. This will allow you to upgrade, customize or bug fix in isolation.
To replicate for HA, use "mc mirror -watch SOURCE TARGET" command to pair them up. If you have multiple drives (JBOD), you can eliminate RAID or ZFS and use Minio's erasure code to pool them up. Distributed version is also in testing at the moment. It should be out in a month.