It looks similar to minio, which as also an AGPL single binary that implements the S3 API. However Minio is written in Go and Garage is in Rust. I'd love to see a detailed comparison.
Does it have API parity with S3 ? On top of normal get/put S3 offers a retention policies and abilities to apply say a given header to a file or whole bucket
Reading that only makes Minio and Garage seem more similar. They are both single-binary, clustered, S3-compatible file storage solutions. They are both meant for self-hosting on consumer-grade hard drives, provide redundancy to deal with drive or node failures, and don't aim to implement the entire AWS S3 API surface.
We're running Ceph with Rook and Minio in Kubernetes. I'm evaluating Garage as an alternative for some purposes such as application instance static files for Python or Javascript applications to avoid block volumes in deployments. Garage has a simpler high availability distribution story than Minio's erasure coding striping, but it works well for applications that don't require sub-second writes. It can do high availability with only three nodes versus four for Minio, which works well for smaller setups. It can also serve static websites straight from a bucket, which would work well for static sites like those made with static site generators.
Ceph has an S3 API gateway, but it's a more wholesome solution better suited for larger setups compared to Minio and Garage.
It seems that Garage is designed to be fast when inter-node latency is high. A geodistributed "cluster," for example, would profit from using Garage instead of Minio.
