I Just Want Simple S3

The promise and the pain

You'd think storing a few gigabytes on a LAN would be the easiest thing in the world. Apparently not. The problem: you want plain S3 semantics, reliability, and speed — not a distributed monster or a startup chasing venture gold. It has been reported that Minio effectively pulled the plug on the simple-but-solid crowd, archiving repos as it pivots toward AI-focused customers; allegedly some users also saw sloppy tests (mocked responses hiding broken deletes). Garage looked promising in Rust but felt overbuilt and young. SeaweedFS is clever and feature-rich, but the author’s LAN downloads crawled — a few hundred KB/s that eventually crept to ~10 Mbit/s. CEPH? Powerful. Massive. Overkill.

Versity: the unexpected cure

Enter Versity S3 Gateway — a tool most people haven’t heard of, except, it has been reported that, a handful of national labs and universities. It does something gloriously plain: expose S3 backed by a local POSIX filesystem (and Versity’s ScoutFS), surface policies and anonymous read buckets via a web UI, and tuck object metadata into xattrs. It can proxy to other S3 backends too, which makes it useful as an auth or gateway layer. The writer admits they didn’t deep-dive caching semantics or every nook and cranny — but for the core use case, it just worked.

The emotional beat here is simple: after hopping through half a dozen projects, the author rcloned their data to Versity and saw line-rate downloads on the LAN. Finally, something that feels instant. Relief, pure and small — like finding a reliable old truck in an era of prototype EVs. For folks who "just want simple S3," this is a reminder that the best tool is sometimes the one that does less and does it well. Now we wait for a ZFS-native object store to drop and make the dream even tidier.

Sources: blog.feld.me, Lobsters