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Alarik - a High-Performance S3-Compatible Object Storage

Alarik is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage system written in Swift, licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. It aims to deliver exceptional speed, developer-friendly ergonomics, and a modern cloud-native core. See Documentation

<img src="assets/console_browser_dark.png" />

Why Alarik?

Recent shifts in the ecosystem-especially surrounding MinIO-have revealed how fragile it is to depend on a single “reference” implementation for S3-compatible storage. These changes highlighted structural, licensing, and philosophical issues that many teams had long overlooked.

Alarik exists to provide a modern, transparent, community-driven alternative. Developers and organizations need an S3-compatible store that is fast, simple to operate, easy to extend, and genuinely open-source. No licensing traps, no moving goalposts.

The goal: a self-hosted, high-speed S3 system built for today’s workloads, without the enterprise upsell.

Installation

Please see Documentation

Why Swift?

Swift brings a rare combination of performance, safety, and developer ergonomics:

• Fast: Compiles to highly optimized native code with performance comparable to Rust or Go.
• Safe: Memory-safe by design, eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities common in C/C++ ecosystems.
• Modern tooling: Clear syntax, excellent async/await model, first-class concurrency, and mature package management.
• Great for systems programming: SwiftNIO and related libraries provide extremely efficient networking and I/O foundations.

Swift is an ideal fit for a new generation of cloud-native storage software.

Future of Alarik

We are the ones behind the German Accounting-Software belegFuchs, and although we currently run MinIO in production, we are planning to migrate to Alarik in the future. This isn’t a marketing slogan - it’s a commitment that directly shapes our roadmap.

Because we rely on S3-compatible storage every day, we are fully invested in ensuring that Alarik continues to evolve: solid performance, long-term stability, and an open development model without licensing uncertainty. Our own planned adoption is a practical reason why we are committed to keeping Alarik actively maintained and moving forward.

TL;DR: Alarik is here to stay - it’s not going anywhere.

Performance

Alarik is built with a strong focus on low-latency I/O and highly parallel request handling. New benchmarks on a dedicated Linux machine show that Alarik delivers competitive and in many cases superior throughput compared to MinIO or RustFS, even in early alpha stages.

Benchmark Alarik vs MinIO

We use MinIO’s own benchmarking tool, warp, to measure performance. Both the object store and the benchmark client run on the same Linux host, ensuring results reflect raw engine performance rather than network conditions.

These benchmarks represent the current state of the project. As Alarik’s storage engine and I/O pipeline continue to evolve, we expect performance to improve further.

Alarik

<img src="assets/alarik_benchmark.png" />

MinIO

<img src="assets/minio_benchmark.png" />

State of Development

Alarik is currently in Alpha - under rapid, active development.

• Expect breaking changes and incomplete feature sets.
• Core S3-compatible storage functionality is already operational.
• Stabilization, documentation, and production-grade hardening are in progress.

Contributions, issues, feedback, and real-world testing are highly encouraged.

Contributing

We welcome contributions of any size. Please:

• Use dev branch as your base branch - not master
• Use clear, descriptive commit messages
• Open an issue before starting larger work
• Follow Swift best practices
• Add tests for new functionality where appropriate
• Keep pull requests focused and incremental

More detailed contributing guidelines will be added soon.

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⭐️ Stay Updated

More documentation, benchmarks, SDKs, and deployment guides are on the way.

If you believe in a future of open, community-driven, high-performance object storage, consider giving the repo a ⭐ and contributing!