What happened
For years MinIO was the most common way to run S3-compatible storage on your own server or laptop. That changed in three steps:
- October 2025: the last community-edition release ships. Since then there have been no new binaries or images.
- April 2026: the official repository is archived with the notice "this repository is no longer maintained". The company points to AIStor Free, a free edition under MinIO's own licence, different from the original project's AGPL.
- September 2026: the
minio/minioimage is no longer available on Docker Hub. Tutorials that start withdocker run minio/miniono longer work.
What is already installed keeps running. What no longer arrives is security patches and new releases.
What it means if you are learning
Almost nothing you learned with MinIO is lost. What you learn by practising with object storage is the S3 API: buckets, objects, credentials, and how tools such as Spark, Trino or DuckDB read and write there. That API is the same in every alternative in this note and in the cloud services.
What does change is the install command. If a course or guide asks you for
minio/minio, replace it with one of the options below.
The S3-compatible options
| Option | Licence | Good fit for | Keep in mind |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silo | AGPL-3.0 | Carrying on with MinIO as is: same API, same console, same variables | Community fork maintained by Pigsty (formerly pgsty/minio) |
| SeaweedFS | Apache-2.0 | Many small files, and growing from one node to several | Its architecture is its own; S3 is one of its interfaces |
| Garage | AGPL-3.0 | Small installations, even spread across several locations | Covers the most common S3 operations; check its compatibility list |
| Ceph | LGPL | Data centres that need block, file and object storage in one system | Needs several servers and dedicated operations; not for practice |
| AIStor Free | Own licence | Staying with the company's official product | Not open source |
Which one to practise with
To follow a course or build a portfolio project, Silo is the direct replacement: you change the image name and everything else stays the same.
docker run -d -p 9000:9000 -p 9001:9001 \
-e MINIO_ROOT_USER=admin \
-e MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=admin12345 \
pgsty/silo server /data --console-address ":9001"
If you are designing something meant to last for years, compare SeaweedFS and Garage as well: having more than one possible provider is exactly the advantage of building on the S3 API.
The kiosk's MinIO entry already reflects this change.