garage

Garage is S3-compatible object storage built for small clusters of cheap, mismatched machines instead of enterprise hardware. Point your existing S3 tooling at it, replicate across three nodes in different locations, and it keeps serving through failures. AGPL, completely free, no enterprise edition to upsell you.

It's a single Rust binary designed by a French non-profit that hosts services on secondhand hardware, and it shows in the good way: tiny memory footprint, tolerance for high latency between nodes, no Kubernetes required. You still own cluster layout, replication decisions, and capacity planning, but the operational surface is small.

Solo and homelab: easier to run than minio/minio has become, and it's the pick for self-hosted S3 today. Small teams with a few servers across locations: it was built for exactly you. Companies needing IAM policies, object versioning, and compliance features should compare MinIO or stay on managed storage like R2.

The catch: it's deliberately minimal. Replication only (no erasure coding), no object versioning, and a subset of the S3 API. If your app leans on exotic S3 features, test before you migrate.