Re-watch the ownCloud Conference 2021

Monday, September 27th

After a brief introduction by ownCloud COO Holger Dyroff and CTO Klaas Freitag (re-watch the segment, check out the slides), we started off with our Product Manager Patrick Maier giving a comprehensive introduction to ownCloud Infinite Scale. Our new generation file platform is cloud-native, has a three-tier architecture based on microservices and is built using Go and Vue.js (re-watch the segment, check out the slides and read more about ownCloud Infinite Scale here).

Following this, our Community Manager Katrin Giza talked about our revamped community outreach efforts and unveiled our new Community Program (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

We then discussed the lessons we learned from implementing accessibility in ownCloud Web, our new browser frontend, with the ownCloud Web’s respective Product Manager Tobias Baader and Lead Engineer, Benedikt Kulmann (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

After Monday’s Lunch Break, CERN Storage Group Software Engineer Elizaveta Ragozina discussed CERN’s vision for improving the user experience of CERNbox, their cloud storage solution for synchronizing, sharing and collaborative working on files based on ownCloud (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

Then, VNC’s Lead DevOps Engineer, Daniel Merron, talked about deploying ownCloud on Kubernetes using the official ownCloud Helm Charts that VNC kindly built and made available for the community (re-watch the segment, check out the slides and read more about the official ownCloud K8s Helm Charts here).

In the second part of VNC’s presentation at the ownCloud Conference 2021, VNC Board Member Andrea Wörrlein gave a succinct overview of the ownCloud integration for VNCtalk, VNC’s enterprise real-time communication solution including chat, video and audio conferencing, screen sharing, voice messaging, file sharing, broadcasts, document collaboration and much more (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

Then, ONLYOFFICE’s Senior Marketing Communications Manager Ksenia Fedoruk brought us up to speed with the integration of ownCloud and ONLYOFFICE and its changes since 2019 (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

Afterwards, ThreeFold’s General Manager Chris Hutton and its CTO Weynand Kuijpers presented and demoed the all-new ownCloud instance on the ThreeFold Grid, the first step in the partnership of ownCloud and ThreeFold (re-watch the segment, check out the slides and read more about the partnership here).

Following that, Collabora’s Head of Professional Services Miklos Vajna talked about new developments in Collabora Online, strong improvements and the new Collabora integrations with ownCloud Web and with ownCloud Infinite Scale (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

The last Conference Room event for Monday was a talk about the progress of the Quality Assurance efforts at ownCloud, originally planned to feature ownCloud Infinite Scale Lead Engineer Michael Barz, who unfortunately was sick. So it was held by ownCloud CTO Klaas Freitag, ownCloud Senior Software Developer Benedikt Kulmann and Jankaritech’s Senior Quality Assurance Engineer Artur Neumann (re-watch the segment, check out part 1 of the slides and also part 2).

In the late Monday afternoon, there were workshops. ownCloud Head of Customer Success Ralf Schwöbel and Software Engineer Ilja Neumann talked about debugging in general (check out the slides), while ownCloud Lead Engineer ownCloud Desktop & Mobile Michael Stingl spoke about debugging on the client side. ownCloud Senior Software Engineer Florian Schade held a workshop on building web extensions with ownCloud. Last but not least, CERN Software Engineer Gianmaria del Monte showcased how to visualize physics data in ownCloud Infinite Scale using the ROOT analysis framework (check out the slides).

Tuesday, September 28th

Our Product Manager Patrick Maier started Tuesday’s agenda with giving a wide overview on the past, present and future of what we call ownCloud Classic. He delved into the product development and gave insights on the new features and improvements to our PHP-based server product (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

Then, ownCloud Lead Engineer ownCloud Desktop & Mobile Michael Stingl talked about the ownCloud desktop and mobile clients (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

Afterwards, CERN’s Deputy Group Leader for Storage Jakub Moscicki talked about Science Mesh, a decentralized mesh of enterprise file sync and share nodes like ownCloud (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

Following that, in an interactive session, ownCloud Infinite Scale Principal Engineer Jörn Friedrich Dreyer explored what ownCoud Infinite Scale does differently  with regards to data layout and storage management. He also introduced the Spaces concept and its underlying implementation. (re-watch part 1 of the segment here and part 2 of the segment here and check out the slides).

We then heard about the ground-breaking deployment of ownCloud Infinite Scale at CERN – its first production deployment ever – from CERNbox DevOps Engineer Samuel Alfageme (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

Later, CERN software engineer Ishank Arora outlined the deep relationship and the integration of ownCloud Infinite Scale and CERN’s Reva software (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

GSOC participant and Ahmedabad University student Jimil Desai then explained how to easily develop language plugins for ownCloud Infinite Scale and Reva capable of runtime plugging – i.e., plugins that can be loaded without having to re-compile the software. This makes it possible, among other things, for plugins to be loaded without code disclosure (re-watch the segment, check out the slides).

We then finally pivoted to the panel discussion that marked the end of the conference. The topic: What the real world teaches us about Open Source in enterprise IT. There, CERN Head of Storage Alberto Pace, DB Systel Open Source Steward Cornelius Schumacher and our ownCloud COO Holger Dyroff and CTO Klaas Freitag discussed with the host, Writer and Open Source enthusiast Markus Feilner (re-watch the segment here).

As kind of an aftershow, our engineers Willy Kloucek, David Christofas and Mark Carioscio held a workshop on how to set up ownCloud Infinite Scale (check out the slides).