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+title="Introducing Garage, our self-hosted distributed object storage solution"
+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`).