We are heading into a world where the files of most users are hosted by 4 big companies in the US. This is the case for most home users, companies but also education and research institutions. If we want to keep our sovereignty over our data, protect our privacy and prevent vendor lock-in then we need open source self-hosted and federated alternatives. The internet and the web use a distributed and federated architecture. Now we have to make sure that cloud services follow the same model. This talk will cover how this can be implemented in a real world example. It covers how a 20 million user instance of Nextcloud can be scaled across different hosting centers and continents. It will cover high level concepts but also concrete Kubernetes, Ceph and MariaDB clustering setups.

1. Nextcloud
Frank Karlitschek
Scaling to 20 million users

2. Frank Karlitschek
•Studied Computer Science in Tübingen
•Founder of several IT companies
•KDE contributor and board member
•W3C invited expert
•Fellow at Open Forum Europe
•Advisor to the United Nations about Open Source
•Founder ownCloud
•Founder Nextcloud

3. Agenda
• What is Nextcloud ?
• Feature Overview
• Scaling from very small to very big
• Case Study MagentaCloud
• Case Study América Móvil

4. What is Nextcloud?

5. Fileserver
File Sync & Share
Collaboration
Novell
Windows Server
NFS / AFS
Dropbox
OneDrive
Google Drive
Nextcloud Hub
Microsoft 365
Google Workspace
1980 - 2010
2010 - 2018
2018 - …

6. Productivity, Security, On Premises, Open Source
Files Talk Groupware Office
Nextcloud Hub

7. Nextcloud Files

10. 3
Todo: Screenshot, advanced versioning

12. • Rich workspaces
• File Locking
Files

13. • Rich workspaces
• File Locking
Files

14. 3
screenshot - Object / face recognition in Photos

19. File Access
Control
Block access and sharing
Based on:
• IP
• tag
• LDAP group
• time
• name
• mime type
• size
• user agent
• …

20. • Most requested feature
• Supported in
• iOS
• Android
• Mac
• Windows
• Linux
• Enterprise grade key management
• Sharing
• Files Drop
• Optional Key Recovery
• HSM Support
End 2 End Encryption

21. Nextcloud as central access point for all enterprise data
• SMB/CIFS
• Sharepoint
• S3
• Swift
• FTP
• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• Local
• WebDAV
• Nextcloud
Mount by: user, group, global
Authentication: per user, global, cached
Central auditing, access control, authentication, clients
Data Access Engine

23. • Server 2 Server sharing
• Folder / Files
• Behaves as one service
• Open Cloud Mesh
• Trusted servers
• Autocompletion with Lookup Server
• Access control via File Firewall
Federation

24. Nextcloud Talk

26. Communication Product
• Alternative to:
• Zoom
• Skype for Business
• WebEx
• Microsoft Teams
• Slack
• Audio / Video calls
• Chat
• Integrated into Nextcloud Files
• Integrated into Collabora Online
• Self Hosted
• Webinar use-case
• Phone use-case
• Group chat use-case
Nextcloud Talk

27. • Snapper and better UI
• Posting documents into a conversation (2 sides)
• Conversation/people filters
• New conversation creation flow
• User defined groups / circles
• Mentioning / notification
• Commands / polls
• Lobby
• Video Verification
• Reply feature
• bigger emojis
Talk

35. A group call has started in Brainstormig
upcoming press release

37. Nextcloud Groupware

44. Nextcloud O
ffi
ce

47. 3
screenshot - - local editing

48. 3
Topo: screenshot Spreadsheet

49. 3
Topo: screenshot Presentation

50. 3
Topo: screenshot Draw

52. Nextcloud AI

53. • Code Open Source
• Model Available
• Training Data Available

54. Flexibility

55. Large language model 100% Open Source Fully self-hosted
Nextcloud Assistant

57. Screenshot

58. 3

59. 3

60. 3

61. 3
todo: screenshot or short video how to generate and insert a picture
with Dall-E or Stable Diffusion

62. 3
todo: screenshot or short video how to generate and insert a
picture with Dall-E or Stable Di
ff
usion

63. 3
todo: screenshot or short video Speech to Text
In Mail or Talk

65. 3

66. Scaling from small to big

67. • Raspberry Pi
• 1-10 users
• NextcloudPi
• Nextcloud AIO (All In One Docker Image)

68. • Standard Single Linux Server
• Up to 10.000 Users
• Additional Redis
• MariaDB, MySQL or PostgreSQL
• Local, NFS, S3 Storage
• High Performance Backend Files
• High Performance Backend Talk
• OCS Microservices

69. • Optional
• Additional component written in Rust
• Faster syncing
• 10x less server requests
• Instant notifications
• Clustering enabled
High Performance Backend for Files

70. • Exclusive for customers
• STUN Server (Advanced IP negotiations)
• TURN Server (Firewall tunneling)
• MCU Server (up to 100 users per call)
• Advanced Signaling Server (Scaling to >1M users)
• SIP Bridge (Telephone dialin)
Talk High Performance Backend

71. Python Go
Typescript
Rust
Open Collaboration Services

73. • Cluster Setup
• Up to 5 Million Users
• Perfect horizontal scalability
• Clustered DN
• S3 or NFS Storage
• Redis Cluster
• Offloaded AI Microservices
• Bare Metal
• Virtual Machines
• Containerised
• K8s ready
NC NC NC NC
DB Cluster S3 Storage Redis Cluster
Load Balancer
AI
Nextcloud
Assistent
Cluster

74. AMX

75. • Telekom MagentaCloud
• 3.6 Million users
• Runs in the OTC (Open Telekom Cloud)
• Online since 1.5 years
• Migration Project took 1 year

76. AMX

77. AMX

78. AMX

80. • Scalability > 5 Million users
• Global distribution
• Cost efficiency
• Independent nodes
• Federated sharing between nodes
• Lookup Server
• Global Site Selector
• Balancer
Global Scale

81. Global Scale
Site Site
Site
Site
Global Site
Selector
Lookup Server
Balancer

82. Summary

83. Nextcloud Conference
• Full Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace alternative
• Hosted wherever wanted
• Compliant
• Great scalability
• No foreign laws involved
• 100% open source and free software
• No vendor lock-in
83

84. Questions?
Frank Karlitschek @fkarlitschek