Announcing Alarik - a Swift S3 compatible object storage

Alpha-Software - do not use in production.

Hi everyone,

After quite a few late nights and a lot of coffee, I’m really happy to finally share something I’ve been building:

Alarik - a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage server written from scratch in Swift.

The short version of why it exists: the recent MinIO license drama was the final push that made me think “okay, someone has to build a no-drama, truly open-source alternative that doesn’t play licensing games.”
So I did.

It’s Apache 2.0, runs on Linux, macOS (natively or in Docker), and the very early benchmarks I’ve done on my M4 Pro already beat MinIO and RustFS. I still owe everyone proper, reproducible numbers - they’re coming soon.

It’s still alpha (expect breaking changes, missing features, rough edges), but the foundation feels solid and I’d love to get more eyes and hands on it, especially from the Swift-on-server crowd.

If you’ve ever wanted to play with a storage engine written in Swift, or you just like fast native binaries, come kick the tires. Issues, PRs, wild ideas, or even just “this sounds cool” are all very welcome.

Repo: GitHub - achtungsoftware/alarik: High performance S3 compatible object storage focused on speed and simplicity and designed to be an open alternative to MinIO and RustFS.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to the whole Swift on server team and everyone else who’s been making server-side Swift actually pleasant to use. I have been following the Swift on server progress for years now, and I am really excited about the future and i hope i can be part of it.

- Julian

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Is it really faster than rustfs?

In the areas I’ve tested so far, yes. However, this doesn’t mean Alarik is faster in every situation. I’ll continue testing and will publish the results gradually.

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Would love to see them, thanks!

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