Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3

MinIO's parent company abandoned the open-source project in late 2025 to chase other commercial interests. This left many demos and CI pipelines that relied on MinIO for local S3 emulation in a bind. The author compares seven alternatives: S3Proxy, RustFS, SeaweedFS, Zenko CloudServer, Garage, Apache Ozone, and Ceph Object Gateway. The selection criteria are practical: must have a Docker image, must be S3-compatible, must be free and open-source, simple single-node deployment, and have an active community or commercial backer. The author built a test stack with DuckDB + Iceberg and ran write/read verification for each candidate. The post does not give a final ranking but includes a comparison table of pros and cons.