Deploying Garage on a real-world cluster

To run Garage in cluster mode, we recommend having at least 3 nodes. This will allow you to setup Garage for three-way replication of your data, the safest and most available mode proposed by Garage.

We recommend first following the quick start guide in order to get familiar with Garage's command line and usage patterns.

Prerequisites

To run a real-world deployment, make sure the following conditions are met:

You have at least three machines with sufficient storage space available.
Each machine has a public IP address which is reachable by other machines. Running behind a NAT is likely to be possible but hasn't been tested for the latest version (TODO).
Ideally, each machine should have a SSD available in addition to the HDD you are dedicating to Garage. This will allow for faster access to metadata and has the potential to drastically reduce Garage's response times.
This guide will assume you are using Docker containers to deploy Garage on each node. Garage can also be run independently, for instance as a Systemd service. You can also use an orchestrator such as Nomad or Kubernetes to automatically manage Docker containers on a fleet of nodes.

Before deploying Garage on your infrastructure, you must inventory your machines. For our example, we will suppose the following infrastructure with IPv6 connectivity:

Location	Name	IP Address	Disk Space
Paris	Mercury	fc00:1::1	1 To
Paris	Venus	fc00:1::2	2 To
London	Earth	fc00:B::1	2 To
Brussels	Mars	fc00:F::1	1.5 To

Our docker image is currently named dxflrs/amd64_garage and is stored on the Docker Hub. We encourage you to use a fixed tag (eg. v0.4.0) and not the latest tag. For this example, we will use the latest published version at the time of the writing which is v0.4.0 but it's up to you to check the most recent versions on the Docker Hub.

For example:

sudo docker pull dxflrs/amd64_garage:v0.4.0

Deploying and configuring Garage

On each machine, we will have a similar setup, especially you must consider the following folders/files:

/etc/garage.toml: Garage daemon's configuration (see below)
/var/lib/garage/meta/: Folder containing Garage's metadata, put this folder on a SSD if possible
/var/lib/garage/data/: Folder containing Garage's data, this folder will be your main data storage and must be on a large storage (e.g. large HDD)

A valid /etc/garage/garage.toml for our cluster would look as follows:

metadata_dir = "/var/lib/garage/meta"
data_dir = "/var/lib/garage/data"

replication_mode = "3"

compression_level = 2

rpc_bind_addr = "[::]:3901"
rpc_public_addr = "<this node's public IP>:3901"
rpc_secret = "<RPC secret>"

bootstrap_peers = []

[s3_api]
s3_region = "garage"
api_bind_addr = "[::]:3900"
root_domain = ".s3.garage"

[s3_web]
bind_addr = "[::]:3902"
root_domain = ".web.garage"
index = "index.html"

Check the following for your configuration files:

Make sure rpc_public_addr contains the public IP address of the node you are configuring. This parameter is optional but recommended: if your nodes have trouble communicating with one another, consider adding it.
Make sure rpc_secret is the same value on all nodes. It should be a 32-bytes hex-encoded secret key. You can generate such a key with openssl rand -hex 32.

Starting Garage using Docker

On each machine, you can run the daemon with:

docker run \
  -d \
  --name garaged \
  --restart always \
  --network host \
  -v /etc/garage.toml:/etc/garage.toml \
  -v /var/lib/garage/meta:/var/lib/garage/meta \
  -v /var/lib/garage/data:/var/lib/garage/data \
  lxpz/garage_amd64:v0.4.0

It should be restarted automatically at each reboot. Please note that we use host networking as otherwise Docker containers can not communicate with IPv6.

Upgrading between Garage versions should be supported transparently, but please check the relase notes before doing so! To upgrade, simply stop and remove this container and start again the command with a new version of Garage.

Controling the daemon

The garage binary has two purposes:

it acts as a daemon when launched with garage server
it acts as a control tool for the daemon when launched with any other command

Ensure an appropriate garage binary (the same version as your Docker image) is available in your path. If your configuration file is at /etc/garage.toml, the garage binary should work with no further change.

You can test your garage CLI utility by running a simple command such as:

garage status

At this point, nodes are not yet talking to one another. Your output should therefore look like follows:

Mercury$ garage status
==== HEALTHY NODES ====
ID                  Hostname  Address           Tag                   Zone  Capacity
563e1ac825ee3323…   Mercury   [fc00:1::1]:3901  NO ROLE ASSIGNED

Connecting nodes together

When your Garage nodes first start, they will generate a local node identifier (based on a public/private key pair).

To obtain the node identifier of a node, once it is generated, run garage node id. This will print keys as follows:

Mercury$ garage node id
563e1ac825ee3323aa441e72c26d1030d6d4414aeb3dd25287c531e7fc2bc95d@[fc00:1::1]:3901

Venus$ garage node id
86f0f26ae4afbd59aaf9cfb059eefac844951efd5b8caeec0d53f4ed6c85f332@[fc00:1::2]:3901

etc.

You can then instruct nodes to connect to one another as follows:

# Instruct Venus to connect to Mercury (this will establish communication both ways)
Venus$ garage node connect 563e1ac825ee3323aa441e72c26d1030d6d4414aeb3dd25287c531e7fc2bc95d@[fc00:1::1]:3901

You don't nead to instruct all node to connect to all other nodes: nodes will discover one another transitively.

Now if your run garage status on any node, you should have an output that looks as follows:

==== HEALTHY NODES ====
ID                  Hostname  Address           Tag                   Zone  Capacity
563e1ac825ee3323…   Mercury   [fc00:1::1]:3901  NO ROLE ASSIGNED
86f0f26ae4afbd59…   Venus     [fc00:1::2]:3901  NO ROLE ASSIGNED
68143d720f20c89d…   Earth     [fc00:B::1]:3901  NO ROLE ASSIGNED
212f7572f0c89da9…   Mars      [fc00:F::1]:3901  NO ROLE ASSIGNED

Creating a cluster layout

We will now inform Garage of the disk space available on each node of the cluster as well as the zone (e.g. datacenter) in which each machine is located. This information is called the cluster layout and consists of a role that is assigned to each active cluster node.

For our example, we will suppose we have the following infrastructure (Capacity, Identifier and Zone are specific values to Garage described in the following):

Location	Name	Disk Space	`Capacity`	`Identifier`	`Zone`
Paris	Mercury	1 To	`10`	`563e`	`par1`
Paris	Venus	2 To	`20`	`86f0`	`par1`
London	Earth	2 To	`20`	`6814`	`lon1`
Brussels	Mars	1.5 To	`15`	`212f`	`bru1`

Node identifiers

After its first launch, Garage generates a random and unique identifier for each nodes, such as:

563e1ac825ee3323aa441e72c26d1030d6d4414aeb3dd25287c531e7fc2bc95d

Often a shorter form can be used, containing only the beginning of the identifier, like 563e, which identifies the server "Mercury" located in "Paris" according to our previous table.

The most simple way to match an identifier to a node is to run:

garage status

It will display the IP address associated with each node; from the IP address you will be able to recognize the node.

Zones

Zones are simply a user-chosen identifier that identify a group of server that are grouped together logically. It is up to the system administrator deploying Garage to identify what does "grouped together" means.

In most cases, a zone will correspond to a geographical location (i.e. a datacenter). Behind the scene, Garage will use zone definition to try to store the same data on different zones, in order to provide high availability despite failure of a zone.

Capacity

Garage reasons on an abstract metric about disk storage that is named the capacity of a node. The capacity configured in Garage must be proportional to the disk space dedicated to the node.

Capacity values must be integers but can be given any signification. Here we chose that 1 unit of capacity = 100 GB.

Note that the amount of data stored by Garage on each server may not be strictly proportional to its capacity value, as Garage will priorize having 3 copies of data in different zones, even if this means that capacities will not be strictly respected. For example in our above examples, nodes Earth and Mars will always store a copy of everything each, and the third copy will have 66% chance of being stored by Venus and 33% chance of being stored by Mercury.

Injecting the topology

Given the information above, we will configure our cluster as follow:

garage layout assign -z par1 -c 10 -t mercury 563e
garage layout assign -z par1 -c 20 -t venus 86f0
garage layout assign -z lon1 -c 20 -t earth 6814
garage layout assign -z bru1 -c 15 -t mars 212f

At this point, the changes in the cluster layout have not yet been applied. To show the new layout that will be applied, call:

garage layout show

Once you are satisfied with your new layout, apply it with:

garage layout apply

WARNING: if you want to use the layout modification commands in a script, make sure to read this page first.

Using your Garage cluster

Creating buckets and managing keys is done using the garage CLI, and is covered in the quick start guide. Remember also that the CLI is self-documented thanks to the --help flag and the help subcommand (e.g. garage help, garage key --help).

Configuring S3-compatible applicatiosn to interact with Garage is covered in the Integrations section.

Garage Documentation