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diff --git a/content/blog/2022-introducing-garage.md b/content/blog/2022-introducing-garage.md index 42194bf..a61c725 100644 --- a/content/blog/2022-introducing-garage.md +++ b/content/blog/2022-introducing-garage.md @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ 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 +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.* @@ -23,8 +23,8 @@ 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 +elite: they are most 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. @@ -56,17 +56,17 @@ 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 +Internet is made: making the Internet run has an environmental cost that 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 +grid is not infallible, and 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 +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 @@ -78,7 +78,7 @@ 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 +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 @@ -123,9 +123,9 @@ 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 +used as a storage backend 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 +file system of a server with 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 @@ -135,7 +135,7 @@ 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 +we will show how this allows 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 @@ -155,7 +155,7 @@ 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 +buckets, for a total size of slightly above 500 GB. These numbers 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 |