In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3 compatibility.

In this blog post I’m going to look at some alternatives to MinIO.

Iceberg nicely decouples storage from ingest and query (yay!). When we say "decouples" it’s a fancy way of saying "doesn’t do". Which, in the case of ingest and query, is really powerful. It means that we can store data in an open format, populated by one or more tools, and queried by the same, or other tools. Iceberg gets to be very opinionated and optimised around what it was built for (storing tabular data in a flexible way that can be efficiently queried). This is amazing!

But, what Iceberg doesn’t do is any housekeeping on its data and metadata. This means that getting data in and out of Apache Iceberg isn’t where the story stops.