MinIO Has a Free API — S3-Compatible Object Storage You Can Self-Host

#minio #s3 #storage #devops

MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage server. Run your own S3 locally or on your servers — same API, no cloud vendor lock-in.

What Is MinIO?

MinIO is 100% compatible with the Amazon S3 API. Any tool that works with S3 works with MinIO — SDKs, CLIs, applications.

Features:

S3 API compatible
Single binary
Erasure coding
Encryption at rest
Bucket versioning
Free and open source

Quick Start

docker run -p 9000:9000 -p 9001:9001 \
  -e MINIO_ROOT_USER=admin \
  -e MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=password123 \
  minio/minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

Console: http://localhost:9001
API: http://localhost:9000

S3 API (works with any S3 SDK)

# Using AWS CLI with MinIO
aws --endpoint-url http://localhost:9000 s3 mb s3://my-bucket
aws --endpoint-url http://localhost:9000 s3 cp file.txt s3://my-bucket/
aws --endpoint-url http://localhost:9000 s3 ls s3://my-bucket/

Python (boto3)

import boto3

s3 = boto3.client("s3",
    endpoint_url="http://localhost:9000",
    aws_access_key_id="admin",
    aws_secret_access_key="password123"
)

s3.create_bucket(Bucket="data")
s3.upload_file("local.csv", "data", "remote.csv")

for obj in s3.list_objects_v2(Bucket="data")["Contents"]:
    print(obj["Key"])

Use Cases

Local S3 — develop without AWS costs
Data lake — store Parquet, CSV, JSON
Backup storage — self-hosted backups
ML data — training data storage
Media storage — images, videos, documents

MinIO vs S3

Feature	MinIO	AWS S3
API	Same	Same
Price	Free	Pay per use
Location	Your servers	AWS regions
Performance	Very fast	Fast
Vendor lock-in	None	AWS

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