MinIO: Overview for developers. Why you need it, pros, cons, and alternatives

2025-10-25

In the world of modern applications, especially in the era of AI and big data, storing unstructured data is a key challenge. MinIO is a high-performance object storage distributed under the AGPLv3 license. It is fully compatible with the Amazon S3 API and allows you to deploy storage locally or in the cloud. Designed to scale to exabytes, MinIO is ideal for AI/ML workloads, analytics and web applications. In this article we’ll cover why it’s useful for a developer, evaluate pros and cons, and look at alternatives.

110 | The Modern Era — S3 and Object Storage over HTTP

2025-09-27

Introduction

In previous articles, we looked at classic protocols that work with files and folders. But with the rise of cloud technologies, a new, more flexible and scalable approach emerged — object storage, and the de facto standard for it became the Amazon S3 protocol.

What is S3 and how is it different?

S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a protocol originally developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud storage. Its success was so great that today the “S3-compatible API” has become an industry standard, supported by dozens of providers (Google Cloud Storage, DigitalOcean Spaces, MinIO, etc.).