1. RustFS and SeaweedFS are the fastest in the object storage field.

2. The installation for Garage and SeaweedFS is more complex compared to RustFS.

3. The RustFS console is the most convenient and user-friendly.

4. Ceph is too difficult to use; I wouldn't dare deploy it without a deep understanding of the source code.

Although many people criticize RustFS, suggesting its CLA might be "bait," I don't think such a requirement is excessive for open source software, as it helps mitigate their own legal risks.

Furthermore, Milvus gave RustFS a very high official evaluation. Based on technical benchmarks and other aspects, I believe RustFS will ultimately win.

https://milvus.io/blog/evaluating-rustfs-as-a-viable-s3-comp...

SeaweedFS was started as a learning project and evolves along the way, getting ideas from papers for Facebook Haystack, Google Colossus, Facebook Tectonics. With its distributed append-only storage, it naturally fits object store. Sorry to see MinIO went away. SeaweedFS learned a lot from it. Some S3 interface code was copied from MinIO when it was still Apache 2.0 License. AWS S3 APIs are fairly complicated. I am trying to replicate as much as possible.

Some recent developments:

* Run "weed mini -dir=xxx", it will just work. Nothing else to setup.

* Added Table Bucket and Iceberg Catalog.

* Added admin UI

Working for free is not fun. Having a paid offering with a free community version is not fun. Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun. I learnt this the hard way and I guess the MinIO team learnt this as well.

Other alternatives:

https://github.com/deuxfleurs-org/garage

https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs

https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs

https://github.com/supabase/storage

https://github.com/scality/cloudserver

https://github.com/ceph/ceph

Among others

It was pretty clear they pivoted to their closed source repo back then.

With application dependencies you can swap a library in a day. With object storage that's holding your data, you're looking at a migration measured in weeks or months. The S3 API compatibility helps, but anyone who's actually migrated between S3-compatible stores knows there are subtle behavioral differences that only surface under load.

I wonder how many MinIO deployments had a documented migration runbook before today.

Sofar I've switched to Rustfs which seems like a very nice project, though <24hrs is hardly an evaluation period.

The frustrating part isn't the business decision itself. It's that every pivot creates a massive migration burden on teams who bet on the "open" part. When your object storage layer suddenly needs replacing, that's not a weekend project. You're looking at weeks of testing, data migration, updating every service that touches S3-compatible APIs, and hoping nothing breaks in production.

For anyone evaluating infrastructure dependencies right now: the license matters, but the funding model matters more. Single-vendor open source projects backed by VC are essentially on a countdown timer. Either they find a sustainable model that doesn't require closing the source, or they eventually pull the rug.

Community-governed projects under foundations (Ceph under Linux Foundation, for example) tend to be more durable even if they're harder to set up initially. The operational complexity of Ceph vs MinIO was always the tradeoff - but at least you're not going to wake up one morning to a "THIS REPOSITORY IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED" commit.

In the Ruby on Rails space, we had this happen recently with the prawn_plus Gem where the original author yanked all published copies and deleted the GitHub repository.

On GitHub, when a private repo is deleted forks are deleted. But for public repos, the policy is different. See https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-....

This is the latest of a sunset trap set for those of us who use Minio for local testing but not production use.

Is AIStor Free really free like they claim here https://www.min.io/pricing, i.e

  Free
  For developers, researchers, enthusiasts, small organizations, and anyone comfortable with a standalone deployment.
  Full-featured, single-node deployment architecture
  Self-service community Slack and documentation support
  Free of charge

They could just archive it there and then, at least it would be honest. What a bunch of clowns.

For me, my only use for Minio was to simulate AWS S3 in docker compose so that my applications were fully testable locally. I never used it it production or as a middle ware. It has not sat well with me to use alternative strategies like Ruby on Rails' local file storage for testing as it behaves differently than when the app is deployed. And using actual cloud services creates its own hurdles of either credential sharing among developers and gets rid of the "docker magic" of being to run a single set up script and be up and running to change code and run the full test suite.

My use case is any developer on the team can do a Git clone and run the set up script and then be fully up and running within minutes locally without any special configuration on their part.

They maintain the Docker image, so it works great in a k8s environment, for both local and remote development.

Big thanks to MinIO for providing this option for so many years. I genuinely wish them the best.

I will have to migrate, the cost of "self hosting" what a pain!

Unfortunately I don't know of any other open projects that can obviously scale to the same degree. I built up around 100PiB of storage under minio with a former employer. It's very robust in the face of drive & server failure, is simple to manage on bare hardware with ansible. We got 180Gbps sustained writes out of it, with some part time hardware maintenance.

Don't know if there's an opportunity here for larger users of minio to band together and fund some continued maintenance?

I definitely had a wishlist and some hardware management scripts around it that could be integrated into it.

That said, we also can't blame people for using open source without paying or donating.

I can absolutely take issue with people demanding things of open source projects. They can contribute or pay if they want to be demanding around bug fixes and support.

I've been a big proponent of open source for many years - learning from, contributing to, maintaining, sharing my own projects for free as open-source. I don't expect anything in return.

In fact, open-source projects benefit from contributors. So to me it's a bit incompatible with taking money. Money for what? For who? If it supports the project I'm ok with that, but I've also seen it line the pockets of original authors. I've seen original authors then turn other people's contributions through hard work into a business.

There is a very line between a funded community project and getting free labor for a business.

I take serious issue with open source projects magically one day turning into a business build on the backs of others for free. Not saying that about minIO or any other project. I'm just saying that happens.

I've used minio a lot but only as part of my local dev pipeline to emulate s3, and never paid.

- Obviously, when your selling point against competitor and alternative services was that you were Open Source, and you do a rug pull once you got enough traction, that is not great.

- But also they also switched of target. The big added value of Minio initially is that it was totally easy to run, targeting the possibility to have an s3 server running in a minute, on single instances and so... That was the perfect solution for rapid tests, local setups and automatic testing. Then, again once they started to get enough traction, they didn't just move to add more "scaling" solutions to Minio, but they kind of twisted it completely to be a complex deployment scalable solution like any other one that you find in the market. Without that much added value on that count to be honest.

They stopped maintaining but they forked it to a proprietary product.

It makes sense for a corporate. Still Minio is there to fork, maintain and enhance in a different direction.

Kudos to them.

Looks like i'm gonna give seaweedfs a whirl instead of hunting down the docker image and sha of the last pre-enshittified version of Minio