MinIO is ideal when you need a simple, lightweight object storage solution that is easy to set up and can work quickly in a wide range of environments. It's particularly well-suited for small to medium-sized applications or projects that require scalable storage but have limited infrastructure. A specific scenario to use MinIO over Rook would be when you have a small development team looking to prototype an application that needs object storage with minimal overhead and quick deployment, like a personal project or a startup MVP.
Rook is best used when you need a cloud-native storage solution that operates natively within Kubernetes, especially when managing complex distributed storage systems. It's particularly valuable in environments requiring high availability and scalability, such as a large-scale cloud infrastructure or containerized applications needing persistent storage. For example, if you're running a microservices application on Kubernetes and need a shared file system with high resilience and replication, Rook with Ceph would be a better fit than MinIO.