MinIO Has a Free S3-Compatible Object Storage

MinIO is a free, open-source object storage system that is API-compatible with Amazon S3. Run your own S3 — on your hardware, at your scale.

What Is MinIO?

MinIO is a high-performance object storage system built for cloud-native workloads. It implements the S3 API, so any tool that works with AWS S3 works with MinIO.

Key features:

• 100% S3 API compatible
• High performance (325 GiB/s read, 165 GiB/s write)
• Erasure coding for data protection
• Encryption at rest and in transit
• Versioning and immutable objects
• Bucket replication
• Identity management (LDAP, OIDC)
• Kubernetes native
• Single binary deployment

Quick Start

Docker

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

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

Binary

wget https://dl.min.io/server/minio/release/linux-amd64/minio
chmod +x minio
./minio server /data

Use With AWS SDK

Since MinIO is S3-compatible, use any AWS SDK:

JavaScript

import { S3Client, PutObjectCommand, GetObjectCommand } from "@aws-sdk/client-s3";

const s3 = new S3Client({
  endpoint: "http://localhost:9000",
  region: "us-east-1",
  credentials: { accessKeyId: "minioadmin", secretAccessKey: "minioadmin" },
  forcePathStyle: true
});

// Upload
await s3.send(new PutObjectCommand({
  Bucket: "my-bucket",
  Key: "data/report.json",
  Body: JSON.stringify({ results: [1, 2, 3] })
}));

// Download
const obj = await s3.send(new GetObjectCommand({
  Bucket: "my-bucket",
  Key: "data/report.json"
}));

Python (boto3)

import boto3

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

# Upload
s3.upload_file("local-file.csv", "my-bucket", "data/file.csv")

# List objects
response = s3.list_objects_v2(Bucket="my-bucket", Prefix="data/")
for obj in response["Contents"]:
    print(obj["Key"])

CLI (mc)

# Install MinIO Client
wget https://dl.min.io/client/mc/release/linux-amd64/mc
chmod +x mc

# Configure
mc alias set local http://localhost:9000 minioadmin minioadmin

# Create bucket
mc mb local/my-bucket

# Upload files
mc cp data/ local/my-bucket/data/ --recursive

# List files
mc ls local/my-bucket/

Cost Comparison

Service	1TB Storage/month	Egress 100GB
AWS S3	$23	$9
Google Cloud	$20	$12
Azure Blob	$18	$8.7
MinIO (self-hosted)	$0	$0
MinIO + Hetzner VPS	$5/mo	$0

Use Cases

• Data lakes: Store petabytes of analytics data
• Backups: S3-compatible backup target for restic, Borg, Velero
• ML/AI: Store training data and model artifacts
• Media: Images, videos, documents at scale
• Logs: Centralized log storage

Enterprise Features (Free)

• Erasure coding: Data survives drive failures
• Bitrot protection: Automatic data integrity checks
• Encryption: Server-side encryption with external KMS
• Versioning: Keep every version of every object
• Lifecycle rules: Auto-delete or transition objects
• Replication: Site-to-site, bucket-to-bucket

Who Uses MinIO?

With 49K+ GitHub stars:

• Every major cloud-native project
• AI/ML teams for data storage
• Companies replacing expensive S3 bills
• DevOps for artifact and backup storage

Get Started

1. Run single binary or Docker container
2. Use any S3-compatible tool or SDK
3. Store unlimited data on your hardware

Your own Amazon S3. Free forever.

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