I Just Want Simple S3

I just want S3. My needs are pretty basic. I don't need to scale out. I don't need replication. I just need something that can do S3 and is reliable and not slow.

Minio is dead, they pulled the plug after axing the interface. They archived the repo so they can chase AI industry dollars because those folks have heavily utilized Minio. Good for them, but I always wrote them off after pointing out a bug their tests weren't catching because they were mocking responses, not actually testing the code, and they shrugged it off. (deletes were broken at one point)

Garage is new and interesting being built in Rust, but last I tried (6 months ago?) it was also unnecessarily complex. It's very young, development was paused for a while (funding), and was missing a couple normal S3 features I wanted last I checked. Maybe it's better now. Still feels too heavy.

SeaweedFS is honestly super cool. I like their approach and how they added layers on it so they can do things like support WebDAV. I don't know what's wrong, but I run it with a master and volume node, it's slow. I switch to the new weed mini approach -- still slow. I'm storing a couple GBs of normal files in here, it's nothing fancy, but even on my own LAN I try to download a file and it chugs and chugs -- starts downloading at maybe a few hundred KB/s, eventually ramps up to ~10mbit/s. I don't know why. It's on my LAN, why isn't it instant?

CEPH is a monster. It's huge. We have it at work. Way more complex than I need, but if you really wanted to build something that can compete with Amazon's S3 you probably want CEPH. SeaweedFS is close to being capable as well...

Versity GW -- oh bless you, Reddit commenter, for bringing this one up in a thread about benchmarking S3 backend performance. Nobody seems to know it exists except... Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Lab, the military, bunch of universities...!

The Versity S3 Gateway currently supports generic POSIX file backend storage and Versity’s ScoutFS filesystem.

I don't know what the main use case is for Versity. It can proxy to other S3 backends so you don't have to expose auth or can provide a custom auth layer. Does it do read-through caching? Don't know, didn't check. Can you have some local buckets and some that are proxied? Don't know, didn't check.

But what it can do is just use the local filesystem for S3 storage and that's good enough for me. And I get a web interface to manage it all, it can do anonymous/public read buckets and handles policies. Interesting is that it uses xattrs for storing metadata of the objects.

So I drop this in, rclone my data over, do some testing, and I get lightning fast performance on my LAN like I expect -- line rate downloads! Finally, sanity is restored.

Now I just wait to replace this with a true ZFS native object storage that someone is working on...

Late Contenders

Didn't know about the following until after I deployed Versity, but here are some notes:

RustFS is a newer contender also written in Rust. Also seems heavier than I need. Benchmarks show it's faster than Minio (also POSIX fs backed), they claim 100% S3 compatibility which is impressive if true. "Development began in December 2023, and we officially launched as an open-source project on July 2, 2025." and "users can now migrate from MinIO to RustFS through direct binary replacement." Have not evaluated it yet, not thrilled with adding more Rust to my environment as the compile times are so long and it's not in FreeBSD ports, so I'd have to port it myself. Its usage of the filesystem instead of packing the objects into a custom data format means it would be less performant for small objects, but I want regular fs backed anyway. Give it entire disks/filesystems and it can distribute the data across them, repair/heal when replacing broken disks. Neat!

rclone has the ability to act as an S3 server, but that's not its main purpose and I'm hesitant to rely on it. I knew about this, but wrote it off. If I had to guess I'd say the server is mostly implemented to make it easier for them to test their client.

filestash seems like a nice all-in-one that I should look into. "It started as a storage agnostic Dropbox-like file manager that works with every storage protocol: FTP, SFTP, S3, SMB, WebDAV, IPFS, and about 20 more."

Zenko CloudServer is another I've never heard of. Written in NodeJS, so enjoy your single threaded event loop...

Supabase Storage is also NodeJS, but stores metadata in Postgres. Authorization is handled with Postgres Row Level Security. Interesting concept.