261 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
261 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
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title="Results of the community survey"
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date=2024-03-12
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*We ran a community survey to gather feedback from Garage users and potential
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users during a two-month period. One of the main objectives of
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this survey was to determine expectations from the community for Garage's
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upcoming v1.0 release and for future work. Read this article for a discussion
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of the results.*
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---
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The survey collected 127 response during a time period of almost 2 months,
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from the 15th of January to the 12th of March.
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The first question we asked users were how they have heard of Garage:
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the majority answered that they have head of Garage through a link
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aggregator or social network such as Reddit or HN. A portion of
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users have heard of it from word of mouth, and a significant portion also
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answered "Other". Unfortunately we didn't ask respondents for details
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if they selected "Other", so I'm quite curious as to what this could be.
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Other choices have almost negligible number of responses.
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<center><img src="all-how-known.png" /></center>
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Half of the respondents indicated that they are currently running a Garage cluster
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for production data, of which a small fraction indicated running it in a commercial
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setting. Another third of respondents indicated that they are currently testing Garage
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or have tested it previously.
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<center><img src="all-currently-admin.png" /></center>
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## About currently running Garage installations
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We first asked users what kind of data they were storing in Garage.
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The first answer, selected by about half of the participants,
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is for storing back-ups, followed closely by personal files.
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Other answers follow with a rougly linearly decreasing pattern.
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<center><img src="all-data-kind.png" /></center>
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The majority of users are not running Garage in geodistributed mode,
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but many users are also running in 2, 3 or even 4 locations.
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<center><img src="all-n-zones.png" /></center>
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A large majority of users are only using Garage through the S3 API.
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The remaining users are mostly using a mix of S3 API and web API,
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with a small number of users (5) using Garage primarily as a web server.
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<center><img src="all-access-mode.png" /></center>
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Regarding the size of clusters, the majority of installed clusters are less
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than 1TB in size. The others are almost all between 1TB to 10TB. 8 users
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indicated that they are running clusters of more than 10TB. Two users that
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reported running clusters of more than 100TB, but they also indicated that they
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are not currently using Garage, so I think that's the size of the data they
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would like/need to store on Garage, but not the actual size of an
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installed cluster. The number of objects stored in clusters is quite evenly
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split between less than 10k, 10k to 100k, and more than 100k.
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<center><img src="all-cluster-size.png" /></center>
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<center><img src="all-cluster-object-count.png" /></center>
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For about half of respondents, this means storing mostly objects of around 100MB in size.
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For the others, it's mostly objects of around 10MB. This is very inexact since the
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proposed answers for cluster size and object count had such large ranges.
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<center><img src="all-object-size.png" /></center>
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## Satisfaction regarding Garage
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A majority of users reported a high degree of satisfaction with Garage.
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About a quarter said that Garage has some significant flaws. A small portion
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of respondents indicated that they cannot use Garage due to missing
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important features or critical bugs, but still took the time to answer
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the survey (thanks to them!).
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<center><img src="all-satisfaction.png" /></center>
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The top 3 strong points of Garage reported by its users are: good S3 compatibility
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(first place, with 2/3 of respondents agreeing), good performance on small / low-power
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machines, and easy setup. I'd say we are pretty much on target, as these are some of the
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main objectives of Garage.
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<center><img src="all-strong-points.png" /></center>
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As for most wanted features in Garage, there is a clear winner with a web interface
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for cluster administration, with over 40% of users mentioning it. The second most
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wanted feature is support for S3 versioning, with almost 30% of answers.
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<center><img src="all-wanted-features.png" /></center>
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The vast majority of users reported never losing data that they stored in Garage.
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Only one indicated that they lost data and it was Garage's fault: this was
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because they tried to move an LMDB database between machines with different
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architectures, but the LMDB on-disk format is architecture specific. We should
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probably be more clear about this in the documentation.
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<center><img src="all-lose-data.png" /></center>
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# Users in a "homelab/self-hosted setting"
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52 respondents indicated that they are using Garage for storing production
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data in a homelab or self-hosted setting. I'd say this is the most
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representative portion of Garage users, as it is its primary target.
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Let's look at the answers from these users only.
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## About the clusters
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Personal files now takes the first place of the kinds of data stored on these clusters,
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still closely followed by back-ups.
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<center><img src="homelab-data-kind.png" /></center>
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These users are mostly not using Garage in a geodistributed setting.
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The distribution of answers is very similar to the overall.
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<center><img src="homelab-n-zones.png" /></center>
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Most clusters of these users are less than 1TB and size,
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and the remaining are mostly in the 1TB - 10TB range.
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There are fewer clusters than average storing more than 100k objects in this population,
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but the distribution of object sizes (not shown) is very similar to the overall.
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<center><img src="homelab-cluster-size.png" /></center>
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<center><img src="homelab-cluster-object-count.png" /></center>
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## Satisfaction regarding Garage
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Homelab/self-hosting users reported a level of satisfaction a bit higher with Garage,
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with almost 3/4 very satisfied.
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<center><img src="homelab-satisfaction.png" /></center>
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The top 3 reasons for using Garage are the same, but good performance on small
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/ low-power machines is now taking the first place.
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<center><img src="homelab-strong-points.png" /></center>
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The top 2 wanted features are still the same, now with an equal number of votes.
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<center><img src="homelab-wanted-features.png" /></center>
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# Users in a "commercial setting"
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Fewer users indicated that they are running Garage in a commercial setting,
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as this concerned only 12 of the respondents to the survey.
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## About the clusters
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Half of users reported using Garage to store back-ups,
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and almost half reported storing observability data and web app / service data.
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One third selected static websites.
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<center><img src="commercial-data-kind.png" /></center>
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Users in a commercial setting are more consistent in their use of the
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geo-distribution features offered by Garage. Only one third of users are
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not running in geo-distributed mode. Another third is running Garage in 2 locations,
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and the last third is running in 3 or more locations, thus benefitting from
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the best resiliency properties that Garage can offer.
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<center><img src="commercial-n-zones.png" /></center>
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The majority of commercial deployments are storing between 1TB and 10TB of data.
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About a quarter are storing more than 1 million objects.
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<center><img src="commercial-cluster-size.png" /></center>
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<center><img src="commercial-cluster-object-count.png" /></center>
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It seems that the average object size is much smaller in this population:
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the majority of answers correspond to average object sizes of less than 10MB,
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and one foruth of answers corresponds to objects of around 1MB.
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<center><img src="commercial-object-size.png" /></center>
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## Satisfaction regarding Garage
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Three quarter of these users reported a high degree of satisfaction with Garage,
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about the same as for homelab users.
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<center><img src="commercial-satisfaction.png" /></center>
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The most liked qualities of Garage are a bit different. Fewer users reported
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satisfaction due to the easy setup of Garage, but more users indicated
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that the possibility of easily adding and removing nodes was important to them.
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Good tolerance to offline nodes and crashes, and good performance in the face
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of latency, which are the core properties that make Garage work well in
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geo-distributed settings, were selected by two thirds of users, most likely
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the same that said they are running in geo-distributed mode.
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<center><img src="commercial-strong-points.png" /></center>
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A web interface for cluster administration is still the most wanted feature, with 40%
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of votes. Then, one third voted for better monitoring and observability, and for
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per-bucket levels of consistency and numbers of replicas. Only 25% voted for S3
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versioning.
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<center><img src="commercial-wanted-features.png" /></center>
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# Users that have the biggest clusters
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7 users reported running clusters storing more than 10TB of data.
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About half of these users are using Garage for a homelab or self-hosted setup,
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and one is in a commercial setting.
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<center><img src="big-currently-admin.png" /></center>
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## About the clusters
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Almost all of these users are using Garage to store back-ups.
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Multimedia files are the second most selected option, which
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would explain why these clusters are so big.
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<center><img src="big-data-kind.png" /></center>
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These deployments are quite evenly split between not
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being geo-replicated and being geo-replicated in 2 or 3 locations.
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<center><img src="big-n-zones.png" /></center>
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## Satisfaction regarding garage
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A majority of users report a high degree of satisfaction with Garage,
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but many users also reported significant flaws.
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<center><img src="big-satisfaction.png" /></center>
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Unsurprisingly, when clusters start becoming big enough, the most requested
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improvement is better performance around the board.
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Per-bucket levels of consistency and number of replicas was also selected
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by almost half of users.
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<center><img src="big-wanted-features.png" /></center>
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# Users that reported that garage had some significant flaws
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Focusing on users that reported that Garage is usable for them but has "significant flaws",
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the two most requested features were a web administration interface and S3 versioning.
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Bucket-level ACLs (that would allow anonymous access directly from the S3 endpoint)
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and performance improvements came next.
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<center><img src="flaws-wanted-features.png" /></center>
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Concerning users that said that Garage has critical issues that is preventing
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them from using it, the "Other" option was the most selected answer for the
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requested features. Licensing issues allegedly preventing commercial use were
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cited by a few users (hint: it's actually a non-issue, and we will write about
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this at some point), but I think for most of these users, they have a specific
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use case in mind which is not targeted by Garage. For instance, several have
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indicated that they would need POSIX filesystem compatibility and/or the
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possibility to use Garage as a CSI driver in Kubernetes (unfortunately, this is
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mostly impossible to achieve with good performance in a geo-distributed
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environment, and the principles on which Garage is based explicitly prevents it
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from fulfilling this role).
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