Upgrade MinIO AIStor on Kubernetes (Helm)

Upgrade MinIO AIStor Helm clusters on Kubernetes infrastructure.

MinIO AIStor Helm installations consist of two primary components:

1. Operator Chart - Controls resources like CustomResourceDefinitions and core operator functionality
2. Object Store Chart - Deploys and manages MinIO AIStor instances

Upgrades involve updating these charts and deploying new container images. The exact procedure depends on your cluster environment’s network configuration and registry access.

The AIStor Operator upgrades an object store one pod at a time, so the cluster keeps serving requests for the whole upgrade. Each pod finishes the requests it is already handling before it stops, up to the number of seconds set in rollingTimeoutSeconds, which defaults to 600. A request still running when that period expires is cut off, so raise the value if your workload has requests longer than ten minutes.

Clients connected to a pod that restarts do reconnect, and a load balancer sends them to a pod that is still running. Most S3 SDKs retry failed operations, so applications generally do not surface an error.

Upgrading to or from a release earlier than RELEASE.2025-12-20T04-58-37Z replaces every pod at once instead, which stops the cluster until the pods come back.

For how this compares with restarting every node at once, and how to choose between them on Linux, see Choose a restart mode.

Before upgrading in any environment:

• Review the upgrade prerequisites
• Back up your existing Helm configurations
• Ensure you have a valid, current MinIO AIStor license
• Verify the health of your current cluster
• Review release notes for breaking changes

See the scenario-specific guides above for detailed prerequisites and step-by-step instructions.

Select the upgrade guide that matches your environment:

Regardless of your cluster scenario, MinIO AIStor upgrades follow this general workflow:

1. Update Operator Chart - Upgrade the operator chart and deploy the new operator image
2. Update Object Store Chart - Upgrade the object store chart and deploy new object store images
3. Bump the API version - Synchronize the API version across all nodes after the upgrade

You can also upgrade only the MinIO AIStor Object Store image version without updating the chart itself if you only need to update the running software version.