When Redis messed with their licensing terms a while ago, I thought to myself, “which project that I rely on will be next?” And I kept thinking it was going to be Minio.
So I switched from Minio to Garage a few months ago and it has worked great. I used the AWS cli to start copying everything over one evening, and when I woke up the next day, it was done. My S3 use is just one giant bucket for my music collection in Funkwhale, so I only had the one command to run. After updating the S3 urls in Funkwhale’s configuration, everything was good to go.
This has all made me start paying closer to attention to what kind of organization is behind the various open source projects that I use. Garage is made by a web development shop in France – they might even be a coop, or I might be thinking of someone else. I could be wrong about that last part. But they’re definitely not a VC-backed operation like Minio.
Advantage of MinIO was for me the UI. Set custom bucket policies for Mastodon or Outline? No problem
Adding new users and bind them to one bucket? Easy via UI, same for creating buckets.
I don’t know if Garage supports vHost access or only pathstyle. I need both. Another thing was generating a public access link, it was just a view clicks.
Even SSO was easy via UI. I never needed the CLI once. It just worked and was integrated. No third party tools needed.
Are they fucking kidding us? No more user management, no more sso, no more policies via UI… What the fuck? Changelog on Github says UI cleanup, but this is entirely a removal 🤬
I don’t like the CLI for MinIO
Will switch back to 2.0, I hope for a fork.
Look into Garage
I quote myself from this reply:
Advantage of MinIO was for me the UI. Set custom bucket policies for Mastodon or Outline? No problem
Adding new users and bind them to one bucket? Easy via UI, same for creating buckets.
I don’t know if Garage supports vHost access or only pathstyle. I need both. Another thing was generating a public access link, it was just a view clicks.
Even SSO was easy via UI. I never needed the CLI once. It just worked and was integrated. No third party tools needed.
Fork yourself!
Well there’s your problem.
The AI advertising is just a symptom of the underlying issue; VC funding.
The more I learn about AI the more I feel like it’s another dot-com bubble.
LLMs and generative AI are such multifaceted systems that saying “this is for AI” is like saying “this is for the WWW”
Databases, interfaces, storage, networking. All are used in AI but if you just say you make a database and not and “AI database” you’ll lose out on investors.
It’s a bit like the gold rush in that everyone is so fixated on the gold that they don’t see the real economic boom is selling the shovels and building the trains.
That’s because it is another bubble. They’re all bubbles IMO. Since the boom of the internet they’ve all been scrambling from one fools gold rush to the next. Crypto, nft, metaverse, AI. Heel even social media that was given freely isn’t returning the expected investments and that’s why they’re all enshitiffying.
That’s the thing though, free social media was giving them massive returns. But the line must go up. And once they completely saturated the market, there are only two ways to make the line go up: expand the market (give Internet to communities that didn’t have it), or extract more money from your existing users (enshittify). Facebook made a half assed attempt at the first one for a couple years, then pivoted hard to the second.
People have been using AI tech for decades. It’s just marketing terms come and go.
Yeah, a few years ago they advertised themselves as the perfect storage solution for blockchain projects.
Well there’s your other problem.
…
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Next, you’re going tell me a billionaire’s involved somehow!
Looks like it’s Michael Dell and Masayoshi Son.
Investors include Intel (Pat Gelsinger, net worth ~82m), Dell (Michael Dell, ~112b), and SoftBank (Masayoshi Son, ~29b). Probably others, but I’m on my phone so getting this info is awkward.
VC?
Venture capital
I’ve never used it but I hear it is actually good but less well known
I’ve completely switched away from using Minio (and just the S3 protocol in general) in all of my projects.
I’ve found that the WebDAV protocol is better for object storage in almost every case. It’s also way simpler to use and understand.
Now it’s time for me to shill:
I wrote my own WebDAV server called Nephele. It’s free and open source, and you can run it on Docker. Probably doesn’t help if you’re using something that requires S3, but if you’re building something, I implore you to migrate away from S3.
Yeah WebDAV is significantly better for our use cases, S3 has so many weird limitations and it’s hard to find clients for it.
Why is WebDAV better?
It’s simpler, there is a client for everything even mobile phones, it has a move command, it has props that can be edited without a copy command, pagination is however you set it up to be rather than a one size fits all approach, it can be just as scalable as S3 if you build it to be, it has much simpler locks that make them easier to use so you might actually use them, keys can be longer than 1024 characters, actual directories exist.
That’s just the protocol level. The biggest benefit for me isn’t really at the protocol level, but part of the design of my own WebDAV server: deduplication. I can throw the same file into my server with 50 different keys, and it will only take up the space of one copy on disk. This basically moved the logic of deduplication from my application to the blob store. Mountains easier from an application design perspective.
There are use cases where S3 is better, but they are few and far between. And, WebDAV is extensible. You can build whatever functionality you need into it, rather than using some proprietary protocol.
Thanks!
MacOS hates webdav (And I do hate my Mac too !) And their implementation is outdated… Maybe I didn’t find the right configuration to make is work properly like samba shares (after some special/specific mac configuration on the samba server side it works like a charm !!) but whenever a file got updates in an automated way, it somehow goes poof and vanished from my server… Scary shit !
Monetary needs and all that. If it’s a startup with VC then there is either not enough people paying or not enough private users supporting by other means like bug fixing, support, etc. Or greed by VC. But in general, what do we expect where the time comes from people spend on coding for us? See openssl that is essential and was about to loose its main dev. Pay or donate or contribute. Preferably to a non VC project.
Monetary needs and all that. If it’s a startup with VC then there is either not enough people paying or not enough private users supporting by other means like bug fixing, support, etc. Or greed by VC.
Well, VC is greedy by design. A VC-funded business will never be optimized for longevity, a good product or happy customers. They may achieve those things en passant, but they’re never the objective.
For example: Any case of “there is not enough people paying” can also be rendered as “the scale and moving speed of the business is way off”.
New fork incoming in 3…2…
Let’s hope for a fork. If I wanted CLI only, I would use Garage…
Minio is honestly kinda “meh” from an Ops perspective. I’d prefer something that doesn’t require a UI myself. They do have some extras that Garage doesn’t provide, but they can be addressed at different levels of interaction.
But it is / was very friendly for users to create new users, edit bucket policies and so on without annoying CLI commands
Luckily I wasn’t even using the UI in the first place, still, not a good sign and probably something to look into for replacement.
They not only force their user to buy their crap, they also intentionally and maliciously frame the AGPL in a certain way.
God damn it. I chose minio for my S3 implementation. I wonder if there is a migration path to garage…
mc mirror is a pretty straightforward method of migration. Should work if the other end is S3-compatible.
Fucking cunts.
