MinIO used to be the go-to for simple S3-compatible storage. Then they archived their open-source repo to chase AI industry money. Feld, who documented his search for basic local S3 storage, puts it bluntly: "Minio is dead." The company refocused on enterprise AI customers, leaving behind users who just needed reliable object storage without the complexity.
The alternatives each fell short in different ways. SeaweedFS has an interesting architecture with WebDAV support, but transfers on his own LAN crawled at a few hundred KB/s before eventually limping up to 10mbit/s. CEPH could compete with Amazon's S3, Feld notes, but it's a monster, way more than anyone needs for simple local storage. Garage, built in Rust, felt unnecessarily complex and was missing S3 features he wanted when he tried it six months ago.
Then a Reddit commenter pointed him to Versity GW, an S3 gateway backed by Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. It sits on local POSIX filesystems and uses extended attributes for metadata. Feld dropped it in, copied his data over with rclone, and got line-rate downloads. Problem solved. The tool includes a web interface for managing policies and supports anonymous read buckets. Problem solved, no AI pivot required.