Garage
An open-source distributed object storage service tailored for self-hosting
Garage Community Survey 2025
Our next Garage milestone (funded by NLnet) aims to deliver an improved experience for administrating Garage clusters, including a new web admin UI which is in development. To this end, we are collecting feedback from our users in order to provide the best possible user experience! We would be glad to have your input with this new edition of our Community Survey.
Made for redundancy
Each chunk of data is replicated in 3 zones
Zone (multiple servers)
Chunks of data
Our Goals
We made it lightweight and kept the efficiency in mind:
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Self-contained
We ship a single dependency-free binary that runs on all Linux distributions
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Fast to deploy, safe to operate
We are sysadmins, we know the value of operator-friendly software
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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:
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Any x86_64 CPU from the last 10 years, ARMv7 or ARMv8
CPU
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1 GB
RAM
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At least 16 GB
Disk space
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200 ms or less, 50 Mbps or more
Network
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Build a cluster with whatever second-hand machines are available
Heterogeneous hardware
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.
Sponsors and funding
Garage has benefitted multiple times from public funding:
- 2021-2022: NGI POINTER provided funding for 3 full-time employees for one year
- 2023-2024: NLnet / NGI0 Entrust provided funding for 1 full-time employee for one year
- 2025: NLnet / NGI0 Commons Fund provided funding for 1.5 full-time employee for one year
If you want to participate in funding Garage development, either through donation or support contract, please get in touch with us.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2021 research and innovation programme within the framework of the NGI-POINTER Project funded under grant agreement N° 871528.
This project has received funding from the NGI Zero Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101069594.
This project has received funding from the NGI Zero Commons Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101135429.