MinIO is in Maintenance Mode—Now What? Exploring the Best Self-Hosted S3 Alternatives

If you're into self-hosting, chances are you've crossed paths with MinIO at some point. It's been one of the go-to solutions for S3-compatible object storage — a sleek, powerful, and enterprise-ready option that played nice in both hobbyist labs and serious production environments. That's why, when MinIO quietly dropped the bomb on their GitHub README stating the open-source version was entering "maintenance mode," the reaction was instant and loud: frustration, confusion, and a lot of scrambling. For the self-hosting crowd, this wasn't just a technical shift — it felt like a betrayal. A project built on the strength and enthusiasm of its open-source community had effectively ghosted the very people who helped it grow. So what now? ## Let's Get This Straight: What Did MinIO Actually Do? In their latest README update, MinIO announced they would no longer be accepting new changes or reviewing issues in the open-source repo. Critical security fixes? Those *might* get evaluated — if you're lucky. For anyone relying on MinIO in a serious capacity, especially for internet-facing workloads, that kind of "maybe we'll patch it" approach raises massive red flags. It also became clear this wasn't a spontaneous move. According to some longtime users, signs had been there for a while — from pulling the web GUI out of the open-source version to steering more resources toward **AIStor**, their commercial, closed-source fork. And that fork? According to users, it's subtly incompatible with MinIO in certain failure cases, making migration messy and trust even messier. In short: if you were using MinIO because it was open, transparent, and community-driven, that ship has sailed. ## The Community Reacts: Anger, Sadness, and Migrations The response online was immediate and, frankly, kind of heartbreaking. "We paid for support to encourage a great open source project and this is what comes of it," one user shared, pointing to their company's failed attempt to rely on MinIO's open-source roots for troubleshooting. Another user compared the move to Broadcom's strategy of wringing profit out of beloved tools post-acquisition: milk the community for goodwill and free labor, then close it up behind a paywall when it's convenient. But the silver lining? The community isn't sitting still. In true self-hosting fashion, people are already testing, migrating, and recommending viable alternatives. Here's a closer look at what's rising from MinIO's ashes. --- ## 1. Garage — The Surprise Darling of the Migration Wave Garage, built by the folks at Deuxfleurs, has suddenly found itself in the spotlight. It's a distributed object storage solution written in Rust (for the Rust fans out there) and it's getting a ton of love from former MinIO users. Not only does it support S3 APIs, but it's resource-light, straightforward to deploy with Docker and Traefik, and — perhaps most importantly — still very much community-driven. Users migrating from MinIO note the performance is solid, setup is well-documented, and there's even a clean Web UI, although admittedly more basic than MinIO's slick dashboard. Downsides? Some are still figuring out how access control works, and Garage's user base, while growing fast, is still relatively niche. --- ## 2. SeaweedFS — Lightweight, Battle-Tested, and Go-Based SeaweedFS is another name that's popping up with increasing frequency. Written in Go and known for its scalability, SeaweedFS offers a more traditional filesystem approach underneath a robust S3-compatible interface. It's not quite "drop-in replacement" easy, but it gets close — and unlike MinIO, the team seems committed to the open-source model. It does chunking well, handles large files by splitting them across volumes, and even offers a special "large disk" build for massive use cases (think up to 8TB per volume). That makes it especially appealing for those handling media files, backups, or machine learning datasets. That said, the documentation can be sparse in places, and it might take a bit more tuning compared to Garage. Still, it's proving to be a solid choice for those wanting more control and flexibility. --- ## 3. RustFS — Promising, But Not Quite Production-Ready Some adventurous users are playing with RustFS, another S3-compatible storage solution written in Rust. Early impressions are good — the architecture makes sense, performance looks solid, and it aligns with the kind of minimalist elegance Rust fans appreciate. But here's the caveat: even the developers admit it's not quite production-ready. If you're running mission-critical workloads or large-scale backups, you might want to wait until things stabilize. Still, it's a name to watch — especially if you're the kind of self-hoster who likes living on the edge and contributing to early-stage projects. --- ## 4. Ceph with RadosGW — For the Hardcore Storage Nerds For those who don't flinch at complexity and want something bulletproof, Ceph with its S3-compatible Rados Gateway (RadosGW) remains a powerful option. It's not for the faint of heart — setting up Ceph can be daunting — but if you've got the chops (or a team that does), it offers rock-solid clustered storage with excellent scalability and redundancy. Users who've deployed it in production speak highly of its flexibility and resilience. It's been the backend of choice for companies and platforms that need enterprise-grade object storage without vendor lock-in. But again: this isn't plug-and-play territory. --- ## But Why Does This Keep Happening? What happened with MinIO isn't new. We've seen it with Redis, Terraform, MongoDB, and other open-source darlings. A project builds up community goodwill, gets widespread adoption, and then — once it's enterprise-ready — pivots hard to protect the commercial revenue stream. The frustration isn't just that the code went closed source. It's that users contributed time, code, and trust to something they believed was part of the open web. When that gets shut off, it feels like more than just a repo change — it feels like being used. And yet, we keep going. Because the alternative — full lock-in, zero transparency, and no control — is even worse. --- ## Moving Forward: What Should You Do? If you're still running MinIO in your homelab and it's doing what you need, you don't need to panic. It's not like it suddenly stopped working. But understand this: it's now a dead end for the open-source community. No new features, questionable security fixes, and a future that's now locked behind a commercial paywall. For new deployments or anyone planning for the long term, it's time to move on. Whether you pick Garage for its simplicity, SeaweedFS for its power, or Ceph for its enterprise scale, the key takeaway is this: **Own your stack. Keep your options open. And don't forget — the best part of self-hosting isn't the tech. It's the freedom.** --- MinIO's story is still unfolding, but its community has already started writing the next chapter. And from what we're seeing, it might be a better one — lighter, faster, more open. The question is no longer "what happened to MinIO?" It's: **what are we building next?**