tldr: minio has removed the administration features from the console in their community open-source edition, and that sucks!
discovering Minio for me was super exciting, a free and open-source s3 API compatible object storage, written in GO and super fast? what else could I want for my side projects!
Just being able to slap the s3 client for any language or framework was a reason to use minio on prod.
But unfortunately the faith of this project has changed. like many other open-source projects, the founders of minio started shipping an enterprised version, which is fair. we’ve been seeing that for quite sometime now, when open-source projects charge for their enterprise tiers to invest more into developing their software.
But the problem about minio is rooted in greed. in an unfortunate decision any version of minio higher than RELEASE.2025‑04‑22T22‑12‑26Z drops support for an administration functionality, which existed since the very early days of minio, allowing you to manage your object server and buckts on that. instead it is now only available to the paid customers.
This move has made many minio users angry, including me, this is what I call taking users hostage and in every way possible is against the promises of open-source and free software which minio claims to be part of.
this is becoming a very serious problem with open-source, OSS used to be about building and shipping to the world, accepting contributions and making software that helps people, better, every single day.
today, unfortunately it is becoming a trend that certain developers, use the idealogy of open-source to gain traction toward their software, benefit from community contributions to make their software more robust and bugfree and eventually when they are at peak of having users, pull the rug under them and restrict all the core features that once was the reason for users to use their software, under the paid plans. This shows nothing but absolute greed and lack of respect for what people in the open-source community believe in.
This is building a product under disguise of open source, and it is not cool.
Fortunately for me, there are other available options that offer s3 compatible API, for less complexity with minimal required resource. if you’re using minio open-source, I’d highly suggest you do that too, because I’d not expect anything good from people who’d displayed their commitment to their users and open-source in the future.
Some of the current alternatives to minio with s3 compatible API: SeaweedFS, Garage, Zenko.
Cheers
Mahdi