In the field of GIS development, on-premises deployment is an extremely common requirement, and MinIO is almost synonymous with private object storage. Whether storing hundreds of terabytes of remote sensing imagery or billions of loose map tiles, MinIO has consistently been the "cornerstone" of WebGIS architecture due to its simple deployment, excellent S3 compatibility, and the high performance of the Go language. However, just last week, the official MinIO GitHub repository announced an update to the project's status, moving it to maintenance mode and ceasing to accept new feature requests. The main changes are as follows:
- The codebase is now in a maintenance-only state.
- No new features, enhancements, or pull requests will be accepted.
- Critical security fixes may be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
- Existing issues and pull requests will not be actively reviewed.
- Community support will continue on a best-effort basis via Slack.
- For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please refer to MinIO AIStor.
To summarize the key point: if you wish to use a continually updated version of MinIO in the future, you must pay for the commercial version, MinIO AIStor. According to my research, the price is quite steep, requiring a subscription service. The annual fee is $96,000 to manage 400TB of data (a price point that is essentially unfeasible within the domestic GIS community in China).