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-title="Who we are and what we're doing"
-date=2022-02-01
-+++
-
-*Deuxfleurs is a non-profit based in France that aims to defend and promote
-individual freedom and rights on the Internet.  In their quest to build a
-decentralized, resilient self-hosting infrastructure, they have found that
-currently existing software is often ill suited to such a particular deployment
-scenario.  In the context of data storage, Garage was built to provide a highly
-available data store that exploits redundancy over different geographical
-locations, and does its best to not be too impacted by network latencies.*
-
-<!-- more -->
-
----
-
-Hello! We are Deuxfleurs, a non-profit based in France working to promote
-self-hosting and small-scale hosting.
-
-What does that mean? Well, we figured that big tech monopolies such as Google,
-Facebook or Amazon today hold disproportionate power and are becoming quite
-dangerous to us, citizens of the Internet. They know everything we are doing,
-saying, and even thinking, and they are not making good use of that
-information. The interests of these companies are those of the capitalist
-elite: they are mostly interested in making huge profits by exploiting the
-Earth's precious resources, producing, advertising and selling us massive
-amounts of stuff we don't need. They don't truly care about the needs of the
-people, nor do they care that planetary destruction is under way because of
-them.
-
-Big tech monopolies are in a particularly strong position to influence our
-behaviors, consciously or not, because we rely on them for selecting the online
-content we read, watch, or listen to. Advertising is omnipresent, and because
-they know us so well, they can subvert us into thinking that a mindless
-consumer society is what we truly want, whereas we most likely would choose
-otherwise if we had the chance to think by ourselves.
-
-We don't want that. That's not what the Internet is for. Freedom is freedom
-from influence: the ability to do things by oneself, for oneself, on one's own
-terms. Self-hosting is both the means by which we reclaim this freedom on the
-Internet – by not using services of big tech monopolies and thus removing
-ourselves from their influence – and the result of applying our critical
-thinking and our technical abilities to build the Internet that suits us.
-
-Self-hosting means that we don't use cloud services. Instead, we store our
-personal data on computers that we own, which we run at home. We build local
-communities to share the services that we run with non-technical people. We
-communicate with other groups that do the same (or, sometimes, that don't)
-thanks to standard protocols such as HTTP, e-mail, or Matrix, that allow a
-global community to exist outside of big tech monopolies.
-
-### Self-hosting is a hard problem
-
-As I said, self-hosting means running our own hardware at home, and providing
-24/7 Internet services from there. We have many reasons for doing this. One is
-because this is the only way we can truly control who has access to our data.
-Another one is that it helps us be aware of the physical substrate of which the
-Internet is made: making the Internet run has an environmental cost which we
-want to evaluate and keep under control. The physical hardware also gives us a
-sense of community, calling to mind all of the people that could currently be
-connected and making use of our services, and reminding us of the purpose for
-which we are doing this.
-
-If you have a home, you know that bad things can happen there too. The power
-grid is not infallible, neither is your Internet connection. Fires and floods
-happen. And the computers we are running can themselves crash at any moment,
-for any number of reasons. Self-hosted solutions today are often not equipped
-to face such challenges, and might suffer from unavailability or data loss
-as a consequence.
-
-If we want to grow our communities, and attract more people that might be
-sympathetic to our vision of the world, we need a baseline of quality for the
-services we provide. Users can tolerate some flaws or imperfections, in the
-name of defending and promoting their ideals, but if the services are
-catastrophic, being unavailable at critical times, or losing users' precious
-data, the compromise is much harder to make and people will be tempted to go
-back to a comfortable lifestyle bestowed by big tech companies.
-
-Fixing availability, making services reliable even when hosted at unreliable
-locations or on unreliable hardware, is one of the main objectives of
-Deuxfleurs, and in particular of the project Garage which we are building.
-
-### Distributed systems to the rescue
-
-Distributed systems, or distributed computing, is a set of techniques that can
-be applied to make computer services more reliable, by making them run on
-several computers at once. It so happens that a few of us have studied
-distributed systems, which helps a lot (some of us even have PhDs!)
-
-The following concepts of distributed computing are particularly relevant to
-us:
-
-- **Crash tolerance** is when a service that runs on several computers at once
-  can continue operating normally even when one (or a small number) of the
-  computers stops working.
-
-- **Geo-distribution** is when the computers that make up a distributed system
-  are not all located in the same facility. Ideally, they would even be spread
-  over different cities, so that outages affecting one region do not prevent
-  the rest of the system from working.
-
-We set out to apply these concepts at Deuxfleurs to build our infrastructure,
-in order to provide services that are replicated over several machines in several
-geographical locations, so that we are able to provide good availability guarantees
-to our users. We try to use as most as possible software packages that already
-existed and are freely available, for example the Linux operating system
-and the HashiCorp suite (Nomad and Consul).
-
-Unfortunately, in the domain of distributed data storage, the available options
-weren't entirely satisfactory in our case, which is why we launched the
-development of our own solution: Garage.  We will talk more in other blog
-posts about why Garage is better suited to us than alternative options. In this
-post, I will simply try to give a high-level overview of what Garage is.
-
-### What is Garage, exactly?
-
-Garage is a distributed storage solution, that automatically replicates your
-data on several servers.  Garage takes into account the geographical location
-of servers, and ensures that copies of your data are located at different
-locations when possible for maximal redundancy, a unique feature in the
-landscape of distributed storage systems.
-
-Garage implements the Amazon S3 protocol, a de-facto standard that makes it
-compatible with a large variety of existing software.  For instance it can be
-used as a storage back-end for many self-hosted web applications such as
-NextCloud, Matrix, Mastodon, Peertube, and many others, replacing the local
-file system of a server by a distributed storage layer.  Garage can also be
-used to synchronize your files or store your backups with utilities such as
-Rclone or Restic.  Last but not least, Garage can be used to host static
-websites, such as the one you are currently reading, which is served directly
-by the Garage cluster we host at Deuxfleurs.
-
-Garage leverages the theory of distributed systems, and in particular
-*Conflict-free Replicated Data Types* (CRDTs in short), a set of mathematical
-tools that help us write distributed software that runs faster, by avoiding
-some kinds of unnecessary chit-chat between servers.  In a future blog post,
-we will show how this allow us to significantly outperform Minio, our closest
-competitor (another self-hostable implementation of the S3 protocol).
-
-On the side of software engineering, we are committed to making Garage
-a tool that is reliable, lightweight, and easy to administrate.
-Garage is written in the Rust programming language, which helps us ensure
-the stability and safety of the software, and allows us to build software
-that is fast and uses little memory.
-
-### Conclusion
-
-The current version of Garage is version 0.6, which is a *beta* release.
-This means that it hasn't yet been tested by many people, and we might have
-ignored some edge cases in which it would not perform as expected.
-
-However, we are already actively using Garage at Deuxfleurs for many uses, and
-it is working exceptionally well for us. We are currently using it to store
-backups of personal files, to store the media files that we send and receive
-over the Matrix network, as well as to host a small but increasing number of
-static websites. Our current deployment hosts about 200 000 files spread in 50
-buckets, for a total size of slightly above 500 GB. These number can seem small
-when compared to the datasets you could expect your typical cloud provider to
-be handling, however these sizes are fairly typical of the small-scale
-self-hosted deployments we are targeting, and our Garage cluster is in no way
-nearing its capacity limit.
-
-Today, we are proudly releasing Garage's new website, with updated
-documentation pages. Poke around to try to understand how the software works,
-and try installing your own instance! Your feedback is precious to us, and we
-would be glad to hear back from you on our
-[issue tracker](https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/issues), by
-[e-mail](mailto:garagehq@deuxfleurs.fr), or on our
-[Matrix channel](https://matrix.to/#/%23garage:deuxfleurs.fr) (`#garage:deuxfleurs.fr`).