RustFS: S3-Compatible Object Storage Written in Rust

RustFS: S3-Compatible Object Storage Written in Rust

By How we write our guides

RustFS is a self-hosted object storage server that speaks the S3 API, so anything that can talk to Amazon S3, including backup tools, media apps, and static site hosts, can use it as a storage backend. It reached 1.0 in September 2026, which is the point at which many people start treating a storage system as production-ready.

Why it is getting attention

For years, MinIO was the default answer to “I want S3 on my own hardware.” MinIO’s move to AGPL licensing and its later reductions to the community edition’s features pushed a lot of homelab and small-business users to look for alternatives. RustFS answers that directly:

  • Apache 2.0 licensed, permissive and without AGPL obligations
  • Written in Rust, with memory safety as an explicit design goal
  • MinIO migration paths, including coexistence and an on-disk compatibility mode that is still in preview

Features

  • S3-compatible API, with a published compatibility matrix
  • Distributed mode with fault tolerance
  • Object versioning, encryption, object locking (WORM), and lifecycle rules
  • Bucket and site replication
  • OpenStack Swift API and Keystone authentication
  • A web console, audit logging, and multi-tenancy
  • Observability through Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger

Deployment

A single-node test instance runs from the official image:

docker run -d --name rustfs -p 9000:9000 -p 9001:9001 \
  -v /srv/rustfs:/data rustfs/rustfs:latest

Pin a version tag rather than latest for anything you care about. Docker Compose, Helm charts for Kubernetes, and a Nix flake are also provided.

Things to know

Object storage is the kind of software where “1.0” is the start of trust, not the end of evaluation. Test your actual workload, including large multipart uploads, listing buckets with many objects, and whatever backup tool you plan to point at it, and keep a copy of important data elsewhere while you do. Garage is the other lightweight option worth comparing for small, geo-distributed setups, and SeaweedFS for very large numbers of small files.

For backups to RustFS, restic and borg both support S3 backends.

License

Apache License 2.0.

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SeaweedFS: A Distributed File System and S3 Store Built for Billions of FilesA scalable distributed storage system in Go with O(1) disk access, S3-compatible object storage, FUSE mounts, WebDAV, SFTP, erasure coding, and replication, designed to handle huge numbers of small files.Restic: Fast, Encrypted, Deduplicating BackupsA single-binary backup program with client-side encryption, deduplication, and support for many storage backends including S3, SFTP, and local disks.OpenObserve: Logs, Metrics, and Traces in a Single Binary With Cheap StorageAn observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, and real user monitoring that stores data as compressed Parquet on local disk or S3, queried with SQL and PromQL. A lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch and Datadog. AGPL-3.0.Kopia: Encrypted, Deduplicated Backups With a GUI and a Repository ServerA fast, open source backup tool with client-side encryption, deduplication, compression, snapshot policies, a desktop GUI, and support for S3, B2, Azure, GCS, SFTP, WebDAV, and rclone backends.

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