News

ownCloud Infinite Scale is rewritten from the ground up in Go and equipped with a modern microservice architecture, which not only makes it fast and scalable, but simplifies deployment immensely, to the point of simply downloading a binary, making it executable, and running it.

History

The redevelopment of ownCloud has been announced in September 2020.

*“The developers at ownCloud are enthusiastic about the switch and are thrilled about the ongoing collaboration with the very professional Go community,” *summarizes Felix Böhm.

Only a few months later, ownCloud Infinite Scale had its initial release in December 2020, followed by the release of ownCloud Infinite Scale 1.5 (the sixth Tech Preview) in April 2021. The next milestone was reached, when ownCloud Infinite Scale went live at CERN in September 2021. Currently, ownCloud Infinite Scale is available as Technology Preview 1.15.

What we like about ownCloud Infinite Scale

We have kept a close eye on the development of ownCloud Infinite Scale ever since the redevelopment has been announced. The change from PHP to Go and the introduction of Microservice Architecture sparked our interest.

Adfinis has always been an early adopter of bleeding edge technologies and trends. We can therefore see what kind of significant advantages Go offers when it comes to modern application development.

Our system engineers value the new Microservice Architecture, since it helps engineers to break up complex problems into bite-sized pieces that can be handled by dedicated teams. It also makes parts of the application individually scalable and replaceable.

Given our experience with DevOps and having an internal development team, we can see additional benefits to Microservices, since building integrations becomes more granular and flexible – and language-agnostic.

As contributors and maintainers of open source projects we also learned that focusing on a microservice can make it easier to get started and focus on specific improvements.

Does ownCloud Infinite Scale keep its promises?

ownCloud themselves say that there is exceptional improvement in speed between classic ownCloud and ownCloud Infinite Scale. To put base to these claims, we put ownCloud Infinite Scale through its paces to test if the change from PHP to Go provided any noticeable improvement from an end-user perspective.

We performed some basic benchmarking tests comparing classic ownCloud (ownCloud 10.8, for reference) on top of a LAMP stack against the newest Go-based release and the improvements truly speak for themselves. The improvements in upload and download speed are readily apparent with large files, with a download through the web interface being over 4.5 times faster on Infinite Scale versus its contemporary, and upload speed being noticeably faster on Infinite Scale.

file: Download.mp4

file: Upload via Web Interface.mp4

Users of the WebDAV protocol should not feel left behind either, as the improvements translate to those who don’t use the web interface as well, with uploads of large files through WebDAV being significantly faster on Infinite Scale versus oC 10.

file: Upload via WebDAV.mp4

Simultaneous uploading of multiple smaller files, however, is a more muted, yet still noticeable improvement on Infinite Scale, as both the PHP and Go implementations of ownCloud seem to handle this well, whether it be through the web interface or WebDAV.

file: Multi-upload via Web Interface.mp4

file: Multi-upload via WebDAV.mp4

UI responsiveness is also increased on Infinite Scale, the response time of the server accessing a folder halved on the Go-based architecture compared to the traditional PHP release.

file: Responsiveness Test.mp4

Summary

We are very excited about ownCloud Infinite Scale and are waiting for its general availability to bring it to our customer base. The change from PHP to Go and the introduction of Microservice Architecture are game changers that our customers will love.

The low latency and high speed we encountered in our tests are proof that the ownCloud team has made the right decision with ownCloud Infinite Scale. Well done!

About ownCloud

ownCloud GmbH develops and provides open-source software for content collaboration, allowing teams to easily share and work on files seamlessly regardless of device or location. ownCloud can be deployed on-premise or in a private cloud. Or it can be obtained as a Service at ownCloud.online, hosted single-tenancy in a secure datacenter in Germany. ownCloud is GDPR-ready and offers a high level of data security through its architecture and features like multi-factor authentication, encryption, classification and a file firewall. Through well-documented APIs, users can integrate the ownCloud quickly with existing systems, processes or workflows. More than 100 million users worldwide already use ownCloud as an alternative to public clouds – and thereby opt for more digital sovereignty, security and data protection.

More Information https://owncloud.com