Migrating from MinIO to RustFS: A Surprisingly Painless Experience

I’ve been running MinIO for object storage for a while now, and for a long time it did the job well. But over time, MinIO’s relationship with its open-source community has soured. They’ve been steadily deprecating OSS features and stripping functionality from the community edition to push users toward their enterprise offering. It’s a move I understand from a business perspective, but it left a bad taste in my mouth — and more importantly, it left gaps in what I actually needed.

So, I started looking for alternatives.

Considering Garage

My first stop was Garage, a lightweight, distributed object storage solution that looked really promising on paper. The project has a clear philosophy, good documentation, and an active community. The problem? It didn’t seem to have solid Kubernetes support, which was a dealbreaker for me since I run nearly everything on k8s. If Garage gets better k8s support down the road, I’d be curious to revisit it — but it wasn’t the right fit right now.

Enter RustFS

After a bit more research, I landed on RustFS. The name alone gives you a sense of what you’re getting: object storage, written in Rust. It has a Helm chart available, which meant getting it into my cluster via ArgoCD was straightforward. Start to finish, I had RustFS deployed and running in about half an hour. My exact configuration can be found here.

There really weren’t any gotchas during the deployment itself. The only hiccup I ran into was embarrassingly simple: I couldn’t figure out how to log in. Turns out I had just missed the default credentials sitting right there in the docs and the helm values files. Classic. Once I was in, I went back and updated my helm values with my own credentials.

This is when I encountered my only real issue. After deploying the app with the new credentials, I went back to my browser where I was still logged in under the old credentials. I tried logging out, but the page would keep refreshing or jittering whenever I tried. I tested in incognito and the new credentials worked, so it was stuck in some weird state. A hard refresh did not work, and ultimately I had to clear my cache for the last 15 minutes to remedy the problem.

Migrating the Data

With RustFS up and running, it was time to move my data over. In a larger production environment, I’d probably script the migration using the mc CLI tool to handle things programmatically and ensure nothing gets missed. But I only had a handful of buckets, so I kept it manual:

1. Log into the MinIO instance and download the data from each bucket.
2. Create the corresponding buckets in RustFS.
3. Upload the data.
4. Update the relevant service config to point to RustFS instead of MinIO.
5. Verify everything works.

Repeat for each bucket. No problems, no data loss, no surprises. After each migration, I tested the service using that bucket to make sure it was reading and writing correctly before moving on. Everything checked out.

Final Thoughts

The whole process was smoother than I expected. If anything, it makes me wish I had made the switch sooner instead of tolerating MinIO’s slow slide away from its OSS roots.

So far, RustFS has been solid. It does what it says on the tin, it plays nicely with Kubernetes, and the deployment experience was genuinely pleasant. MinIO had a good run, but if they’re going to prioritize enterprise customers over the community that helped build their reputation — well, I think RustFS is happy to pick up the slack.

MinIO can kick rocks.