S2 Lite is an open-source, self-hostable stream store that uses S3-compatible object storage as its durable backend. By pointing S2 Lite at Tigris, you get globally replicated, append-only streams at object storage prices ($0.02/GiB/month) with zero egress fees. The post covers the streaming landscape from ephemeral pub/sub to Kafka, explains where S2 fits (durable, replayable, high-cardinality streams without Kafka's operational complexity), and walks through setup on Tigris with Docker and the S2 CLI. Use cases highlighted include ingesting the Bluesky firehose, IoT telemetry, CDC streams, and per-agent reasoning traces for distributed AI workloads. The key trade-off is higher tail latency compared to local NVMe, making it unsuitable for ultra-low-latency workloads like HFT.
Table of contents
The streaming spectrum What S2 actually is Running S2 Lite on Tigris Building things with Bluesky Coordinating distributed agents Why object storage for streams Try it out Sort: