MinIO is often preferred when you need a fast, lightweight solution that's easy to set up and manage, especially if you primarily work with S3-compatible applications. It's ideal for scenarios where performance and simplicity are prioritized, such as in a microservices architecture or for edge computing applications.
Ceph is ideal for large-scale deployments where multiple types of storage (object, block, file) are needed in a unified platform. You would use Ceph over MinIO when you require a multi-use storage system that can handle petabytes of data with redundancy, like in a cloud infrastructure or large data center environment.