What is the minimum contribution expected from an M.Sc. thesis?

In my opinion and experience, it is relatively rare for an MSc thesis to yield truly original research resulting in a paper. The primary goal of a MSc thesis is to teach you important research skills: come up with a general idea of what to do, researching literature, coming up with a specific question that you want to address, performing research (computations, fieldwork, lab experiments), and finally writing it down in a thesis. If you successfully complete this cycle, I think your MSc thesis is a success. If the thesis, after some editing, is original enough to end up as a journal paper this is a big bonus.

This is largely depends on your supervisor expectations.
Some professors have certain requirements for their MSc students to graduate (i.e. publishing one paper) others do not have contribution requirements and knowing the literature is enough to them.
Even if you do have publishable work, some professors will keep pushing you and you will end up with three years MSc thesis similar in away or another to a PhD thesis.

In general, you are required to know the current literature of your subfield/problem area very well and summarize it in a thesis. It is definitely better to implement/compare different techniques, trying to identify challenges and trying to tackle one of the challenges.

For example, your general area is cloud computing, your thesis topic is about materialized views or query processing under cloud computing infrastructure. This requires finding the current literature of query processing, how it is different under cloud computing settings and what are the main research challenges

As someone who supervises MS and PhD students, your question makes me very nervous. Why are you now, at this point in your career, trying to sneak by accomplishing as little as possible? You are at the age and time when you should be envisioning great things and trying to create new knowledge (or at least add to it). I always tell my students that the aim of the MS is to generate something publishable (conference or journal paper). The reality is that not all achieve this (and I still let them graduate) but this is what you should aim for. It is for your advisor to know the field, but you need to ask him/her the question: where is this topic publishable? When can we take it to a conference (or to a journal)? If the advisor can't see how your work could be publishable (if it works out as you plan), then find another topic or find another advisor.