This is where it starts

All right, so this is the first recording about the documentation website. Or rather, I should say, it’s kind of like a Confluence space — a place for us to organize all our thoughts. Eventually (or definitely, I should say), this will be converted into proper documentation that we’ll host online, using a documentation-generation website.

So, what is this for?

This first project — called Story (spelled S-T-O-W-R-Y) — is a storage or object storage platform. Let’s start there.

It’s something like Amazon S3, for example. But as you know, S3 isn’t a self-hostable solution. It’s a great product, don’t get me wrong — it’s solid. But if you think about other services that can be self-hosted, or that are less complicated, I want to contrast that with something like a database.

For instance, I can host a Postgres database myself. I just download the binary, install it, and it’s ready to go. Obviously, Postgres has decades of development behind it — so it’s not a totally fair comparison — but still, it’s very easy for anyone to spin up a database on a VPS and start saving and hosting their app data.

It might not be enterprise-grade reliable, but for a self-hoster, that’s fine. They don’t need four-nines uptime.

So what do you do in that case? Well, you have solutions like Ceph, SeaweedFS, or MinIO — MinIO being the big one.

Now, I don’t want to pretend that I’m inventing something entirely new here — these self-hosted object storage solutions already exist. But I feel that many of them have drifted away from their self-hosting roots.

I know it might sound naive to say that Story won’t eventually go that same route, but the problem I see is that these projects have gone so far into the enterprise space that the self-hosted community has been left behind.

SeaweedFS or Garage might be decent candidates for self-hosting, but I don’t really see SeaweedFS as a gap-filling solution. Seaweed and Garage are both great distributed storage systems — and that’s valuable — but they don’t quite feel like simple, self-hostable solutions.

So, if I were to pick a closest comparable project, SeaweedFS might be it — but Story aims to be much easier for people to host, while still offering all the benefits you’d expect from a modern object storage platform.

Essentially, I envision object storage to become as approachable as a database.

If that sounds interesting to you, I’d love to keep you posted as this project develops.