Out of curiosity are you operating at a scale where "MinIO on a Hetzner node" isn't a viable replacement? I totally believe that's possible, just curious about the use case.

I’d argue that the smaller you are, the more sense S3 makes, since its costs scales down to zero and offer a high degree of reliability from the first file stored.

Rolling your own storage comes with at least some operational expenses, if you’re counting your data/egress in gigabytes that’s likely not worth it compared to just using S3 or similar services.

S3 is so expensive at scale that it only makes sense if you're tiny or if you have extreme durability requirements and your working set is tiny.

The durability can have value at scale, because ensuring it at scale with MinIO can be a lot work. But I often recommend to clients that they deploy a Hetzner setup as a cache, often with storage all the way up covering 100% of their data depending on access partner, because the AWS egress fees are so insanely extortionate that you never really want to read data from AWS at scale other than as an emergency option.

I just use R2. Who says that if I use one company, they have to provide every single service under the sun to be useful?

Linode is quite cheap and comes with Object storage so you don't have to maintain a MinIO

Are you serious? Self-managed MinIO on a bunch of drives vs fully managed operation-less S3. Comparing apples to oranges. And the license, AGPLv3 is a non-starter for virtually any business serious about their intellectual property.

> AGPLv3 is a non-starter for virtually any business serious about their intellectual property.

What do you mean? Can you describe a scenario where this MinIO license matters?

I'm confusing things myself. One's okay as long as one doesn't modify the code.

If you thought "I had to publish any code changes I make to my object storage server" was bad, wait until you find out that you're not even allowed to make code changes to S3 servers!

Obviously the fully-managed nature of S3 is very valuable compared to MinIO but the licensing issues seem neither here or there. Or is there some extra part of the AGPLv3 that I'm not aware of?

Yeah, that - and also managed Kubernetes. Hetzner could seize a lot of potentially lucrative opportunities, but for some reason they choose not to and pretty much stagnate in their offerings. I have been asking the support about both K8s and object storage since close to five years now, but no.

I also used to use Hetzner and I got the feeling they were capitalised to the extent their backers understood the DC/asset model and under-capitalised to software which was too intangible to invest in.

K8s probably means more s/w than hardware, more bodies (for them) more helpdesk and more documentation, more process. More up-front cost. And, they seem to be making money without it. Maybe thats their position?

Their position is that k8s is the wrong layer of abstraction. They might be right, for their business model. Or it might be a case of intentional blindness.