// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests.
As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3 compatibility.
In this blog post I’m going to look at some alternatives to MinIO.
Whilst MinIO is a lot more than 'just' a glorified tool for emulating S3 when building demos, my focus here is going to be on what is the simplest replacement.
In practice that means the following:
So many demos are shipped as Docker Compose, and no-one likes brewing their own Docker images unless really necessary.
The whole point of MinIO in these demos is to stand-in for writing to actual S3.
Must be free to use, with a strong preference for Open Source (per OSI definition) licence e.g. Apache 2.0.
Should be simple to use for a single-node deployment
Should have a clear and active community and/or commercial backer.
Any fule can vibe-code some abandon-ware slop, or fork a project in a fit of enthusiasm—but MinIO stood the test of time until now and we don’t want to be repeating this exercise in six months' time.
Bonus points for excellent developer experience (DX), smooth configuration, good docs, etc.