Hi Macdoor, MinIO has shifted toward a more enterprise-focused model, and its open-source edition is now effectively in maintenance mode (no new features or active development). This has reduced its relevance for many users. In Flink, the implicit direction has been to keep MinIO support mainly for testing as long as it works, but even that may become hard to sustain given limited contributor capacity.
For native S3 connector, the current priority is to deliver a stable, Hadoop-free implementation focused on Amazon S3 using AWS SDK v2. This already requires significant effort, and expanding support to additional S3-compatible systems at this stage would likely slow down that goal. Your idea of defining support tiers makes sense, but timing is important. S3-compatible systems are diverging from AWS S3, and supporting them adds complexity, testing overhead and maintenance cost. Broader compatibility can be revisited later once the core AWS S3 support is more mature. For now, contributions toward strengthening the first native S3 implementation would have the most impact. BR, G
