Blog

Consensus algorithms such as Raft and Paxos, which are used in many distributed databases, have notoriously unpredictable performance in low-quality networks that suffer from latency, jitter, packet loss and/or unavailable nodes, which is why Garage does not use them and uses only CRDTs. A new paper by Antoniadis et al., Leaderless Consensus, introduces a new category of algorithms that better tolerate the frequent unavailability of a subset of nodes. However, additional research and practical work is required before these results can be put into practice. Read for more details.

During the past years, we have thought a lot about possible design decisions and their theoretical trade-offs for Garage. In particular, we pondered the impacts of data structures, networking methods, and scheduling algorithms. Garage worked well enough for our production cluster at Deuxfleurs, but we also knew that people started to experience some unexpected behaviors, which motivated us to start a round of benchmarks and performance measurements to see how Garage behaves compared to our expectations. This post presents some of our first results, which cover 3 aspects of performance: efficient I/O, "myriads of objects", and resiliency, reflecting the high-level properties we are seeking.

Once you have spawned your Garage cluster, you might be interested in finding ways to share efficiently your content with the rest of the world, such as by joining federated platforms. In this blog post, we experiment with interconnecting the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) daemon with Garage. We discuss the different bottlenecks and limitations of the software stack in its current state.

We just published Garage v0.7, our second public beta release. In this post, we do a quick tour of its 2 new features: Kubernetes integration and OpenTelemetry support.

FOSDEM is an international meeting about Free Software, organized from Brussels. On next Sunday, February 6th, 2022, we will be there to present Garage.