We are thrilled that the first beta version of Infinite Scale (2.0.0) is now available. As announced last week by our CTO, Klaas Freitag, Infinite Scale, our new open-source and cloud-native data platform, has entered the beta phase today. In a nutshell, this means that we’ve reached another milestone in the development of our new cloud-native data platform: The product now comes with all the features that we have planned for the upcoming general availability release and we have the confidence to invite external parties into the quality assurance process.
We want to thank the ownCloud community for the steady interest and support in our ideas and work as well as the patience and help during the development phases. Our special thanks goes to the early adopter group for their feedback and early testing and to the highly competitive market environment that has pushed us towards best performance. We also want to thank our former CTO, Felix Böhm, and all current and former team members involved in the creation of Infinite Scale for their hard work and dedication for the project. A special shout-out goes out to our development partners at CERN and the CS3 community for their great support and contributions around the CS3 and REVA projects.
Leaving ‘technology preview’ behind, the beta phase is the last development phase before Infinite Scale will be available and recommended for production use. That being said, it comes with a couple of promises: The APIs, file system layout and other technical attributes are kept stable in the ongoing development. Any changes in these regards will be released according to semantic versioning and will be covered by migration steps that run during the update routines. To facilitate testing efforts, we have compiled an overview list of current features and test scenarios that can be walked through to explore the product. You can find those together with a list of useful resources below. If you want to know more about the Infinite Scale product, make sure to have a read on our product overview page.
Going forward, we are planning biweekly beta releases to incorporate the feedback. With each release, we’ll also have public discussion meetings for mutual exchange. To stay informed, you can sign-up here to be notified about any news around the Infinite Scale beta program.
How to get started with Infinite Scale
To get started with Infinite Scale, you basically have two options:
- Set up Infinite Scale locally or on a host machine of your choice (Docker being an option as well!). All supported deployment options are covered in the Infinite Scale documentation. In the most simple case, it only requires you to issue a couple of commands on the terminal to be up and running.
- Get a free 14-day ready-go instance managed by ownCloud for testing purposes. More information on this can be found here.
We are looking forward to any feedback you might want to share. Please see the guidelines on how to provide feedback below.
Stay tuned, spread the great news and happy testing!
Test scenarios
To facilitate beta testing, we have compiled a number of test cases that can be used to explore Infinite Scale hands-on. We suggest to not just work through them rigidly but to rather consider them as an orientation and be creative with various use cases and usage styles. This way, we hope to get feedback in many different areas to make sure that Infinite Scale is not only fun to use but also covers the diverse use cases in the community.
Find the test scenarios here: https://owncloud.dev/ocis/development/beta-testplan/
Features
Find below a list of functionalities that are available in the beta/GA product:
| Category | Component | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | ||
| Local (POSIX) | “ocis” driver (“decomposedfs”), the default filesystem for Infinite Scale | |
| NFS (POSIX) | “ocis” driver (“decomposedfs”), the default filesystem for Infinite Scale | |
| S3 | “s3ng” driver; with decomposedfs for metadata (POSIX) | |
| ownCloud 10 SQL storage driver | Needed for parallel deployments with ownCloud 10 and for migration purposes | |
| Users & IDM | ||
| Integrated, lightweight user & group management (LibreIDM) | Out-of-the-box integrated user & group management; can be replaced with external LDAP | |
| OIDC (LibreConnect) | OpenID Connect for user authentication and single sign-on based on an integrated identity provider; can be replaced with external identity providers | |
| User roles system | Define user roles based on permissions to create a segregation of duties in administration as well as to distinguish user types | |
| LDAP integration | Integrate an external LDAP/AD user directory | |
| Content Collaboration | ||
| File Management (Upload / Download / Rename / Copy / Move / Delete / etc.) | Ability for users to conduct basic file and folder operations as well as synchronization with clients | |
| Sharing / Access management (permissions on data) | Ability for users to share files and folders with users, groups and via links | |
| Spaces | User-independent project and team folders with multiple owners and dedicated behavior | |
| Deleted Files / Trash bin | Ability for users to restore deleted files | |
| File Versioning | Ability for users to automatically create versions upon file changes and to restore them | |
| Media Viewer (Preview) | Ability for users to preview images, videos and music files in the browser | |
| File Locking | Ability for users to lock files to prevent concurrent edits | |
| Archive download for multiple files and folders | Ability for users to download multiple files and folders as archives | |
| Platform | ||
| User settings | Framework for users to define their settings like web UI language | |
| Notifications | Framework to inform users about events in the platform; Mail notification for the event “Share received” | |
| File Search | Global search by file name, filter current folder by file name | |
| File metadata management framework | Store and retrieve arbitrary metadata related to files | |
| Event system | Framework to enable cross-service communication based on events | |
| Customization | ||
| Web branding (runtime branding based on config values) | Customize the ownCloud Web frontend according to your corporate identity | |
| API & Integration | ||
| WebDAV | API for file operations; API endpoints known from ownCloud 10 | |
| OCS | Open Collaboration Services, ownCloud-specific API endpoints known from ownCloud 10 | |
| LibreGraph | Open implementation of the MS Graph API, currently used for the management of Spaces | |
| Administration & Operations | ||
| Technical service metrics |
Load, memory usage, etc. per ownCloud Infinite Scale service |
|
| Logging | Technical log for operations and debugging | |
| Auditing | Ability to log all operations conducted by users for compliance and traceability | |
| Deployment | ||
| Single binary | The most simple way to deploy Infinite Scale for testing purposes | |
| Systemd | Deploy Infinite Scale as a Systemd service | |
| Docker | Deploy Infinite Scale using Docker and Docker-Compose | |
| Helm / Kubernetes | Deploy Infinite Scale in Kubernetes | |
| Integrations | ||
| Web Office: Collabora Online | Collabora Online can be integrated via the wopiserver extension; automatic file locking capabilities are available | |
| Web Office: ONLYOFFICE | ONLYOFFICE can be integrated via the wopiserver extension; automatic file locking capabilities are available | |
| Web Office: Microsoft Office Online | Microsoft Office Online can be integrated via the wopiserver extension; automatic file locking capabilities are available |
Feedback, bug reports or kudos
To round-off the last corners and make Infinite Scale ready for production use cases, feedback and mutual information exchange naturally are at the heart of the beta phase. Therefore we provide a couple of communication channels for different purposes. These are summarized on the Infinite Scale beta page. If you miss a certain feature, have found some nasty bugs or are wondering about a specific behavior, please file a report on GitHub owncloud/ocis following our guidelines or join our Infinite Scale Chat via talk.owncloud.com.
Useful resources
- Infinite Scale Beta Page
- Infinite Scale Product Page
- Infinite Scale Release Notes
- Infinite Scale Documentation
- Infinite Scale Beta Test Scenarios
- Source code on GitHub
- Some Videos for you
