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Over a timespan of two years and with a growing developer force, we built it: The ownCloud Infinite Scale 1.0.0 Tech Preview! Before we start talking about what it is and what it does, be informed it is not ready for productive use yet. There be dragons. Please use the Tech Preview only for what it’s intended for: testing and experimentation. Nevertheless, we’re very happy and proud to show the capability and performance of the new technology – see for yourselves!

A different beast

With this disclaimer out of the way, let’s start. ownCloud Infinite Scale is a new ownCloud product, based on ten years of experience in enterprise sync and share. It is written in Go, and of course open source, licensed under Apache 2.0. The classic ownCloud, freshly released just Wednesday in version 10.6, depends on a LAMP stack – Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. ownCloud Infinite Scale is a compiled binary with a three-tier architecture that is also databaseless and uses microservices all the way.

ownCloud Infinite Scale is easier and faster and more scalable – all at the same time. It comes with an all-new Web App called ownCloud Web, based on Vue.js, which is quicker and more accessible. For user authentication, it integrates seamlessly with a number of Identity Providers (IdP) through the open authentication standard OpenID Connect. To make it easy to get started, ownCloud Infinite Scale comes with an open-source IdP perfectly suitable for small instances. All up-to-date clients – the 2.7 Desktop Client, the 11.4 iOS App and the 2.15 Android App – are compatible with ownCloud Infinite Scale.

As a fully platform-independent file platform, ownCloud Infinite Scale is super easy to set up and language-agnostic for extenstions. Its three-tier architecture where backend, storage and frontend only interact through APIs makes it much more secure – as well as scalable and available. Database-less and able to multithread, ownCloud Infinite Scale 1.0.0 is already 10 times faster (!) than the classic ownCloud and its derivative and we expect more performance gains along the road.

Improving for everyone

Users get an all-new web frontend – ownCloud Web – that makes work easier through improved usability and a strong focus on accessibility.

Customers and Administrators get drasticaly simplified administration and less effort in maintenance. The microservice architecture means the whole setup is much less error-prone.

The community gets a more flexible ownCloud that is more easily extendible as contributors can now write extensions in any language they choose, because ownCloud Infinite Scale is fully language-agnostic.

Organizations get increased performance and efficiency, enabling savings on hardware and computing capacity and thus contributing to a greener IT.

The road to production releases

Until the first release of ownCloud Infinite Scale for productive use, the ownCloud developers will concentrate on improving stability, the feature set and documentation. Consequently, we are first and foremost looking for issues with the software and holes in its documentation. Please contribute bugs and issues on GitHub or ownCloud Central, our community forum!

Getting started with ownCloud Infinite Scale is pretty straightforward: On Linux, it only takes three terminal commands: Curl-ing the package, making it executable and running it. After that, you can access ownCloud Infinite Scale via your web browser and enjoy! On other platforms, the easy path is installing ownCloud Infinite Scale using Docker.

ownCloud Web, one major component of ownCloud Infinite Scale, is already available as a frontend for ownCloud 10.6. It aims to be strictly functional and transcend to the background so as not to distract users from their actual work. It introduces a clear layout ready to accomodate extensions and uses straightforward flows for sharing and moving files. To work with ownCloud 10.6, ownCloud Web can be installed either as a Marketplace App or as part of a bridge setup with ownCloud Infinite Scale – there is a docker-compose script to make that happen.

So go on and use those days at the end of the year for something with scale. Infinite scale. After eating too much and exhaustively video-chatting with relatives and watching all of those Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Indiana Jones movies, go and start exploring some unknown territory for yourself, from the comfort of your home, and tell us about your discoveries.