Hello Garage, goodbye MinIO

Given the trend where open-source software license changes to be less permissive, or move features behind a paywall, existing users might not be quite as happy about this predicament. Case in point: MinIO Removes Web UI Features from Community Version, Pushes Users to Paid Plans.

But this post is not about that, but rather more on why I'm migrating to garage.

Recently I've been using minio as a dvc backend (think of git LFS but using blob storage as backend) and it accumulated a lot of small files. Understandably, minio performance tanked because it doesn't handle small files well. Also minio deployment seems to use a little too much resources - it consumes 218 MB of memory. This much memory usage would be expected of a web application, but not for something like minio. Also see this minio issue.

To get started with garage, follow this quickstart. Adjust the toml config as necessary.

Note that aws s3 api performs a checksum, and recent aws sdk broke garage's default settings. See this issue.

In essence, to get the most recent of garage (v1.1.0) working with aws cli and sdk, following configurations should be made:

aws config

• set region to the value you specified in garage.toml

environment variables

For preventing invalid checksum errors.

AWS_REQUEST_CHECKSUM_CALCULATION=when_required
AWS_RESPONSE_CHECKSUM_VALIDATION=when_required

Resources consumption

I didn't expect this much difference, but it's very welcome.

Because garage is written in rust, score for Ferris the Crab!