Garage

Object storage sized between a single spare disk and a data center fleet is awkward to come by. Garage fills that gap, an S3-compatible distributed object storage service designed for self-hosting at small to medium scale, the kind of cluster one group can actually maintain.

The architecture assumes the nodes are not all in one room. A cluster is built from machines running at different physical locations, and Garage replicates data across those locations, so the service keeps answering even while some servers are unreachable.

Four priorities shape the project.

• Geo-distribution: replication spans the physical sites a cluster is spread over, not merely separate disks.
• Availability: the storage service stays reachable when individual nodes go down or lose connectivity.
• Lightweight operation: the software is meant to be easy to run and undemanding on the machines hosting it.
• Resilience: machine failure is treated as an expected event rather than an incident.

Because the API is S3-compatible, tools that already speak to object storage can address a Garage cluster directly. Binary releases are published alongside the source, and the documentation covers the design goals, a feature reference and a quick start.

Deuxfleurs, the experimental small-scale hosting provider behind the project, has run Garage in production since its first release in 2020. It is free software under AGPL v3.