Deploy F5 BIG-IP in front of MinIO AIStor S3 storage clusters

This guide shows you how to deploy F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) in front of a MinIO AIStor S3 cluster, presenting the entire cluster as a single, highly available S3 endpoint. BIG-IP load balances requests across the AIStor cluster and uses a write-quorum health monitor to assess cluster-level write readiness, while read traffic may continue when read quorum is maintained, giving storage and network teams a performant and reliable front door to the cluster. As AI data delivery pushes more read and write traffic onto object storage, the alternative of directing traffic to each node separately without a load balancer becomes unwieldy, this new front door offered by BIG-IP becomes the control point for keeping the path between storage and compute fast and resilient.

The procedure is validated on F5 BIG-IP 21.1 in front of a MinIO AIStor cluster, and provides step-by-step instructions so the build is repeatable across environments.

What this guide covers

• Network configuration: untagged internal and external VLANs and the Self IPs that anchor the BIG-IP to each
• A custom HTTP write-quorum health monitor that routes traffic only to AIStor nodes ready to accept writes
• Pool definition spanning all cluster nodes, with round-robin load balancing
• Virtual server setup that binds the cluster to one address and port, with Source Address Translation (Auto Map) so nodes need no return routes to client subnets
• End-to-end validation using the MinIO WARP benchmarking tool to confirm an error-free S3 path through BIG-IP
  

What you'll need

• Administrative access to both the BIG-IP and the MinIO AIStor cluster
• Familiarity with basic L2/L3 networking concepts
• Access to the MinIO AIStor console to create the test bucket, user, and access key

Download the deployment guide for the complete configuration, step-by-step screenshots, and automation you can adapt to your own addressing, naming, and security standards.