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+title = "List of Garage features"
+weight = 10
++++
+
+
+### S3 API
+
+The main goal of Garage is to provide an object storage service that is compatible with the
+[S3 API](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html) from Amazon Web Services.
+We try to adhere as strictly as possible to the semantics of the API as implemented by Amazon
+and other vendors such as Minio or CEPH.
+
+Of course Garage does not implement the full span of API endpoints that AWS S3 does;
+the exact list of S3 features implemented by Garage can be found [on our S3 compatibility page](@/documentation/reference-manual/s3-compatibility.md).
+
+### Geo-distribution
+
+Garage allows you to store copies of your data in multiple geographical locations in order to maximize resilience
+to adverse events, such as network/power outages or hardware failures.
+This allows Garage to run very well even at home, using consumer-grade Internet connectivity
+(such as FTTH) and power, as long as cluster nodes can be spawned at several physical locations.
+Garage exploits knowledge of the capacity and physical location of each storage node to design
+a storage plan that best exploits the available storage capacity while satisfying the geo-distributed replication constraint.
+
+To learn more about geo-distributed Garage clusters,
+read our documentation on [setting up a real-world deployment](@/documentation/cookbook/real-world.md).
+
+### Standalone/self-contained
+
+Garage is extremely simple to deploy, and does not depend on any external service to run.
+This makes setting up and administering storage clusters, we hope, as easy as it could be.
+
+### Flexible topology
+
+A Garage cluster can very easily evolve over time, as storage nodes are added or removed.
+Garage will automatically rebalance data between nodes as needed to ensure the desired number of copies.
+Read about cluster layout management [here](@/documentation/reference-manual/layout.md).
+
+### No RAFT slowing you down
+
+It might seem strange to tout the absence of something as a desirable feature,
+but this is in fact a very important point! Garage does not use RAFT or another
+consensus algorithm internally to order incoming requests: this means that all requests
+directed to a Garage cluster can be handled independently of one another instead
+of going through a central bottleneck (the leader node).
+As a consequence, requests can be handled much faster, even in cases where latency
+between cluster nodes is important (see our [benchmarks](@/documentation/design/benchmarks/index.md) for data on this).
+This is particularly usefull when nodes are far from one another and talk to one other through standard Internet connections.
+
+### Several replication modes
+
+Garage supports a variety of replication modes, with 1 copy, 2 copies or 3 copies of your data,
+and with various levels of consistency, in order to adapt to a variety of usage scenarios.
+Read our reference page on [supported replication modes](@/documentation/reference-manual/configuration.md#replication-mode)
+to select the replication mode best suited to your use case (hint: in most cases, `replication_mode = "3"` is what you want).
+
+### Web server for static websites
+
+A storage bucket can easily be configured to be served directly by Garage as a static web site.
+Domain names for multiple websites directly map to bucket names, making it easy to build
+a platform for your users to autonomously build and host their websites over Garage.
+Surprisingly, none of the other alternative S3 implementations we surveyed (such as Minio
+or CEPH) support publishing static websites from S3 buckets, a feature that is however
+directly inherited from S3 on AWS.
+Read more on our [dedicated documentation page](@/documentation/cookbook/exposing-websites.md).
+
+### Bucket names as aliases
+
+In Garage, a bucket may have several names, known as aliases.
+Aliases can easily be added and removed on demand:
+this allows to easily rename buckets if needed
+without having to copy all of their content, something that cannot be done on AWS.
+For buckets served as static websites, having multiple aliases for a bucket can allow
+exposing the same content under different domain names.
+
+Garage also supports bucket aliases which are local to a single user:
+this allows different users to have different buckets with the same name, thus avoiding naming collisions.
+This can be helpfull for instance if you want to write an application that creates per-user buckets with always the same name.
+
+This feature is totally invisible to S3 clients and does not break compatibility with AWS.
+
+### Cluster administration API
+
+Garage provides a fully-fledged REST API to administer your cluster programatically.
+Functionnality included in the admin API include: setting up and monitoring
+cluster nodes, managing access credentials, and managing storage buckets and bucket aliases.
+A full reference of the administration API is available [here](@/documentation/reference-manual/admin-api.md).
+
+### Metrics and traces
+
+Garage makes some internal metrics available in the Prometheus data format,
+which allows you to build interactive dashboards to visualize the load and internal state of your storage cluster.
+
+For developpers and performance-savvy administrators,
+Garage also supports exporting traces of what it does internally in OpenTelemetry format.
+This allows to monitor the time spent at various steps of the processing of requests,
+in order to detect potential performance bottlenecks.
+
+### Kubernetes and Nomad integrations
+
+Garage can automatically discover other nodes in the cluster thanks to integration
+with orchestrators such as Kubernetes and Nomad (when used with Consul).
+This eases the configuration of your cluster as it removes one step where nodes need
+to be manually connected to one another.
+
+### Support for changing IP addresses
+
+As long as all of your nodes don't thange their IP address at the same time,
+Garage should be able to tolerate nodes with changing/dynamic IP addresses,
+as nodes will regularly exchange the IP addresses of their peers and try to
+reconnect using newer addresses when existing connections are broken.
+
+### K2V API (experimental)
+
+As part of an ongoing research project, Garage can expose an experimental key/value storage API called K2V.
+K2V is made for the storage and retrieval of many small key/value pairs that need to be processed in bulk.
+This completes the S3 API with an alternative that can be used to easily store and access metadata
+related to objects stored in an S3 bucket.
+
+In the context of our research project, [Aérogramme](https://aerogramme.deuxfleurs.fr),
+K2V is used to provide metadata and log storage for operations on encrypted e-mail storage.
+
+Learn more on the specification of K2V [here](https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/src/branch/k2v/doc/drafts/k2v-spec.md)
+and on how to enable it in Garage [here](@/documentation/reference-manual/k2v.md).