Our Goals

We made it lightweight and kept the efficiency in mind:

Self-contained

We ship a single dependency-free binary that runs on all Linux distributions

Fast to deploy, safe to operate

We are sysadmins, we know the value of operator-friendly software

Deploy everywhere on every machine

We do not have a dedicated backbone, and neither do you,

so we made software that run over the Internet across multiple datacenters

Highly resilient

to network failures, network latency, disk failures, sysadmin failures

Keeping requirements low

We worked hard to keep requirements as low as possible:

CPU

Any x86_64 CPU from the last 10 years, ARMv7 or ARMv8

RAM

1 GB

Disk space

At least 16 GB

Network

200 ms or less, 50 Mbps or more

Heterogeneous hardware

Build a cluster with whatever second-hand machines are available

Data resiliency for everyone

We built Garage to suit your existing infrastructure:

Garage implements the Amazon S3 API

and thus is already compatible with many applications.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Garage leverages insights from recent research in distributed systems:

Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store by DeCandia et al.

Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types by Shapiro et al.

Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer by Eisenbud et al.

from Garage - An open-source distributed object storage service