hs5.eu

What It Is

HS5 (High-performance Scale-up Self-hosted Simple Storage Service) is an open-source, self-hosted object storage service that aims to provide AWS S3-like API capabilities while keeping deployment single-node and operations simple. It emphasizes scale-up rather than scale-out: capacity is expanded by upgrading the RAM and storage of a single machine, instead of building a distributed cluster.

Core Capabilities

At its core, HS5 is an S3-compatible object storage system. Buckets and user configuration can be managed through a web interface. Its storage layout mainly consists of LMDB index files and data files, supporting object writes, deletes, and listing. By default, put/delete operations are synced to disk before returning success, providing a relatively clear durability commitment, and it claims the same strong read-after-write consistency as AWS S3. It also offers a manual commit mode that trades durability for performance, as well as a WAL mode designed to improve write performance in certain disk-latency scenarios. The DuckDB UI integration is a highlight, allowing parquet files in HS5 buckets to be read directly, though it currently supports read-only access.

Pricing and Deployment

The available information shows that HS5 is free under the LGPLv3+ license, with no commercial plans, hosted version, SLA, or paid support details provided. Deployment is straightforward: it can be run via Docker or docker compose, or as a downloadable binary on Linux AMD64 systems with glibc 2.35 or newer. It is explicitly intended for single-node deployment only, and metadata and data files can be placed on separate disks to optimize performance.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths include being open-source and free, having a simple architecture, offering S3 API compatibility, a low deployment barrier, and a default focus on durable writes after data is flushed to disk. It is well suited to development/testing, internal tools, and single-machine high-performance object storage scenarios. The drawbacks are also clear: it does not support multi-node scaling, and high availability and disaster recovery are limited by the single-machine design. The available materials do not disclose enterprise-grade capabilities such as encryption, auditing, RBAC, backups, or compliance certifications, and there is no information about commercial support.

Who It’s For and Access from China

HS5 is suitable for technical teams with operational capability that want to control their data and self-host S3-compatible storage, especially where the dataset can fit on a single machine and single-node risk is acceptable. It is not suitable for core enterprise production systems that require cross-node high availability, massive distributed storage, or strict compliance requirements. Access from China is not covered in the available information; obtaining Docker/GitHub resources may be affected by local network conditions. Alternatives include AWS S3, Minio, seaweedfs, and Ceph radosgw.