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I Just Want Simple S3

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Why This Matters

This article highlights the challenges and options for users seeking simple, reliable S3-compatible storage solutions without the complexity of enterprise-grade systems. It underscores the current landscape of open-source projects, their limitations, and the importance of choosing the right tool for basic storage needs in the tech industry and among consumers.

Key Takeaways

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.

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