Software Lifecycle and End-of-Life

Last updated: July 13, 2026.

This page defines the MinIO AIStor software support lifecycle and End-of-Life (EOL) policy, the operating systems and architectures AIStor runs on, the S3 API surface it implements, and the client SDKs MinIO maintains. Support terms depend on your subscription tier. See MinIO Pricing for tier details.

This section defines how long a given MinIO AIStor release is supported and maintained, and when it reaches End of Life.

• Release — A published, versioned build of MinIO AIStor, identified by its release tag RELEASE.YYYY-MM-DDTHH-MM-SSZ.
• Current release — The latest release published by MinIO at any given point in time.
• Support term — The window, measured from a release’s publication date, during which that release is eligible for maintenance under your tier.
• Hotfix — A hotfix release backports a security, regression, or critical-bug fix to a specific release tag so a production deployment can stay on its standardized version and still receive the fix.
• EOL / void — Once a release reaches End of Life for your tier, it is void: it receives no further fixes, security patches, or hotfixes and is no longer eligible for support. Continued use is at your own risk. Remaining supported requires upgrading to a release that is current at the time of upgrade.

Only the current release is supported. The moment a newer release is published, every prior release immediately reaches EOL for Free-tier users. There are no hotfixes on the Free tier — the only way to receive a fix is to upgrade to the current release. Support is community-driven through Slack and documentation.

Each release carries a 12-month support term from its publication date. Fixes are delivered in newer releases: to receive a security or critical-bug fix, upgrade to a release that is current at the time of the upgrade. Hotfix backports to a pinned production version are not included at the Enterprise Lite tier.

A release you run today must be upgraded, before its 12-month term closes, to a release that is current at the time of that upgrade. Once you upgrade, the prior release becomes void.

MinIO supports any released version for up to a 5-year Long-Term Support (LTS) term. Each release carries a 60-month support term from its publication date, and hotfixes backport fixes to the exact release you run in production, so you can remain on a standardized release for up to five years and still receive fixes without a forced version jump.

Support commitments for LTS releases include:

• Security patches — CVE remediations and vulnerability disclosures.
• Critical and high-severity bug fixes — stability and data-integrity issues.
• Predictable EOL date — a release’s end of maintenance is fixed at its release date plus five years, giving each release a known, plannable end-of-maintenance date.

As with Enterprise Lite, a release you run today must be upgraded, before its 60-month term closes, to a release that is current at the time of that upgrade. The prior release then becomes void.

Enterprise customers are encouraged to engage MinIO support through the SUBNET portal for lifecycle guidance, upgrade planning, and prioritized security advisories ahead of public disclosure.

Assume you deploy RELEASE.2026-01-15T..., the current release on the day you deploy it.

• Free — As soon as the next release (for example, RELEASE.2026-02-10T...) is published, RELEASE.2026-01-15T... is EOL. To receive any fix, upgrade to the current release.
• Enterprise Lite — RELEASE.2026-01-15T... is supported through 2027-01-15. To receive a fix during that window, upgrade to the then-current release. Before 2027-01-15 you must upgrade to a current release; the prior release is then void.
• Enterprise — RELEASE.2026-01-15T... is supported through 2031-01-15, with hotfixes backported to it for the full five years. Before 2031-01-15 you must upgrade to a then-current release; the prior release is then void.

MinIO AIStor runs on 64-bit Linux and is regularly validated across the Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu LTS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise families below.

MinIO recommends a 6.8.x or newer kernel for all new deployments. Older 4.x and 5.x kernels — such as those shipped with RHEL 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 — run MinIO AIStor and remain supported, but modern workloads and high-performance NVMe drives demand newer kernels to operate at peak efficiency. A 6.8+ kernel unlocks critical performance features; where possible, bring older hosts to a 6.8+ kernel (for example, through a vendor hardware-enablement kernel) before production use.

See the software checklist for the full pre-deployment software requirements.

MinIO AIStor ships for the AMD64 (x86-64) and ARM64 (aarch64) architectures, distributed as .rpm, .deb, and container images.

Drives must be formatted with the XFS filesystem for the performance and consistency guarantees AIStor depends on. Do not use ext4 or NFS for distributed deployments.

The MinIO AIStor Object API is S3-compatible and a drop-in replacement for Amazon S3 across the documented operations, so existing S3 applications and tooling work against AIStor without changes. Supported object operations include CopyObject, DeleteObject, DeleteObjects, GetObject, GetObjectAttributes, HeadObject, ListObjects, ListObjectsV2, ListObjectVersions, PutObject, RestoreObject, SelectObjectContent, object tagging, conditional headers (If-Match, If-None-Match, If-Modified-Since, If-Unmodified-Since), and object locking, retention, and legal hold.

Per-object ACL operations (GetObjectAcl, PutObjectAcl) are not supported: MinIO AIStor uses policy-based access control rather than per-object ACLs.

For the full, authoritative list of supported and unsupported APIs, see S3 API Compatibility.

MinIO maintains official, S3-compatible client SDKs across the following languages. Each targets the same S3 API surface, so applications are portable across languages.

Because the API is S3-compatible, standard AWS SDKs (for example, boto3, aws-sdk-go, aws-sdk-java) and the AWS CLI also work against MinIO AIStor. See the SDK documentation for quickstarts and API references.