Anfang des Jahres, als Elon Musk zum ersten Mal über die Übernahme von Twitter sprach, twitterte Nextcloud-Gründer Frank Karlitschek bereits, dass Nextcloud an einer Alternative arbeite. Es ist inakzeptabel und eine Gefahr für die Demokratie, dass die Plattformen, auf denen sich Millionen von Menschen miteinander vernetzen, ihre Meinung äußern und sie bilden, in den Händen von Tech-Milliardären liegen. Freie Kommunikation ist ein zu hohes Gut, um von einigen wenigen kontrolliert zu werden.

Darum haben wir mit der Arbeit an Nextcloud Social begonnen, um sicherzustellen, dass es eine Alternative gibt, wenn der Twitter- Deal abgeschlossen ist. Wir werden Nextcloud Social, eine dezentrale, föderierte, soziale Netzwerk-App für Nextcloud, standardmäßig in Nextcloud ausliefern – und damit unsere über 400.000 Server mit vielen zehn Millionen Nutzern erreichen.

Nextcloud Social und das Fediverse

Mit Nextcloud Social können die Nutzer ihre Gedanken in einem Aktivitäts-Feed teilen und die Feeds anderer abonnieren. Die Aktivitäten in Social werden auf der Profilseite des Nutzers angezeigt. Außerdem integriert Nextcloud das Teilen von Fotos und andere Dokumente aus anderen Bereichen des Ökosystems.

Nextcloud-Server können außerdem dem Fediverse beitreten. Das Fediverse ist ein zusammenhängendes und dezentralisiertes Netzwerk von unabhängig betriebenen Servern, die über den „Activity Pub“- Standard kommunizieren. Dazu gehören auch die Server von Mastodon, dem beliebten Open-Source-Konkurrenten von Twitter, über den die Nutzer von Nextcloud und Mastodon in Zukunft Ideen austauschen und diskutieren können.

„Das Mastodon-Projekt ist begeistert, dass Nextcloud-Nutzer nun dem Fediversum beitreten können, wodurch das dezentrale Web um eine Größenordnung wachsen könnte.“

Eugen Rochko, Mastodon-Gründer

Die niedrige Einstiegshürde von Nextcloud Social, kombiniert mit Hunderttausenden von Servern, die bereits online sind, und weiteren Angeboten der großen Hosting-Provider, bringen eine große Nutzerbasis, die dem Fediversum die kritische Masse gibt, die es braucht, um erfolgreich zu sein.

Ohne die Aufsicht durch ein großes Unternehmen oder einer einzelner Regierung, sondern durch die Umsetzung von Richtlinien, die für jeden Server individuell sind, wird der kritische Bedarf an Moderation gedeckt, während die Entscheidungsgewalt verteilt und dezentralisiert wird.

Demnächst verfügbar

Nextcloud Social ist als Alphaversion für frühere Versionen verfügbar, ein Update auf Hub 3 steht kurz bevor. Das Team von Nextcloud arbeitet gemeinsam mit der Community daran, neue Funktionen hinzuzufügen und den Nutzern einen Ausweg aus der Big-Tech-Sandbox zu bieten. Wir werden das aktualisierte Nextcloud Social im Laufe dieses Jahres zu einem Standardbestandteil von Nextcloud machen.

The post Vertrauen Sie auf Musk oder kommunizieren Sie föderiert mit Nextcloud Social! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Those organizations who would like to provide this to their employees and students will be able to use the service from RENATER. You can read our press release announcement here.

While Nextcloud has of course signed hundreds of customers this year, including the French Ministry of Interior, RENATER is special because their Nextcloud Global Scale deployment would be the first in the world to connect a single on-premises cloud instance to the identity providers (IDP’s) of hundreds of organizations.

Our mission at RENATER is enabling seamless collaboration between over a thousand research and education institutions in France in order to protect the security and confidentiality of data. We study and experiment deeply Nextcloud Global Scale for its highly scalability capacities and its reliability that fit the needs of our project.

— Alexandre Salvat, Drive Project Manager – Pôle Projets Transverses et Innovation (P2TI)

Global Scale and identity providers

Let’s step back for a second, what are Global Scale and how does it fit with identity providers?

Global Scale

In late 2016, Nextcloud recognized that, to deliver the most scalable solution in the file sync and share world, work was needed on the ‚top end‘ of the scale. Nextcloud runs on Raspberry Pi devices up to large clusters at universities and companies. The largest Nextcloud cluster node has 250.000 users on a single instance – but this customer already has far more users, delivering file sync and collaboration to tens of millions of users across several continents today! This single installation, thus, is part of a larger architecture we devised for the multi-million-user scale: Global Scale.

limits to scalability: database, storage, data center!

Global Scale removes the major limitations a Nextcloud instance has at large scale: database and storage. As a PHP application, Nextcloud handles each ‚request‘ to the server as an independent process, scaling essentially without limitations: if you need to handle twice the number of users logging in simultaneously, you just double your processing power by adding, for example, a second server. Double again? Go to four, ten, how many you need.

However, each of these Nextcloud application servers will have to talk to the same database and storage, and that is where the problems begin. At large scale, these become expensive, as scaling databases and storage isn’t anywhere near as easy as scaling Nextcloud. At even larger scale, even a data center can become a limitation: the connection to the internet backbone can only handle so much, after all!

Global Scale solves these issues in an elegant way by distributing users and data over separate, independent Nextcloud nodes. These are then ‚wired together‘ with a number of mediating services, to facilitate authentication, sharing and more. The benefits go beyond scalability: it can also allow you to keep data closer to users to improve performance or keep data in specific countries to comply with local regulations.

Watch this youtube video to get a graphical overview of how Global Scale works.

As said, the largest of such nodes in action currently has 250.000 users, but of course the organization which has deployed this has many more nodes! After all, they have to deliver Nextcloud to customers in more than a dozen countries spread over several continents. Each country can run its own node, keeping data local and secure, yet users can log in from one portal, irrespective of where their data is and can share with everyone.

Identity providers (IDP’s) and something new!

Large organizations use ‚identity providers‘ to handle authentication for the many services they provide. Using a technology like SAML they can ensure that a single user can log in once and then access all their services, including Nextcloud. Universities and government organizations often use these and it simplifies their user management a lot.

RENATER wants to provide a solution to the hundreds of organizations in France to which it currently already serves various other IT solutions. These organizations all handle their own accounts for their researchers and students. If RENATER would set up their own user management, users would have to log in twice, or RENATER would have to synchronize the users from the individual organizations into its central user management, something not only difficult and prone to errors, but also always outdated.

Would it not be better if Nextcloud could just use the identity providers from all these organizations directly? Well, yes, it would! But there are many hundreds of them, and nobody has ever tried to provide a single, large self-hosted content collaboration and file storage solution that connects the hundreds of separate organizations into a single service.

Until now.

In collaboration with RENATER, we have improved Global Scale to be able to handle this, and more! No process of syncing and centrally managing users will be required. Universities and research organizations will stay fully in control over their user management, while RENATER would be able to administer the Nextcloud instance independently of the user management.

We are proud to be advancing technological barriers together with RENATER, enabling cross-organizational collaboration and productivity for so many organizations in France. This is another case where our Global Scale architecture provides unique benefits to customers

— Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud GmbH.

Federation in action

This certainly makes RENATER a special case, something we’re proud to talk about. And there is more! Another ‚feature‘ of this large instance will be the use of federation with existing Nextcloud installations. As you can imagine, many French universities and research organizations already have one or even several Nextcloud installations internally, like the University of Nantes. With RENATER, Nextcloud is working to make sure that all these other Nextcloud instances would be able to seamlessly connect to, integrate with and share files to users on the large service! For this, we use our federation features.

Learn more

Want to learn more about what RENATER is up to? You can! They will present their case at the upcoming JRES 2019, December 3-6 in Dijon, France, where several other Nextcloud customers will present their installations as well. RENATER already presented its use case at the Nextcloud Enterprise day last September in Berlin. We will organize another Enterprise day in early 2020, watch our blog to be the first to read about it!

The post French universities and research organizations get access to Nextcloud appeared first on Nextcloud.

The Mastodon project is excited that Nextcloud users can now join the fediverse, potentially growing the decentralized web by an order of magnitude

— Eugen Rochko, Mastodon founder

Introducing Nextcloud Social

Nextcloud helps you stay in control over your data and communication. Social networks are the tool people use to stay up to date with what others are doing, be it in a private or business setting. But most social networks are centralized platforms under control of a single entity. Nextcloud Social provides a decentralized, federated solution that lets users remain in control while sharing status updates with and subscribing to feeds of others across Nextcloud servers.

For business users

For business users, this provides the first steps towards internal enterprise social networking, tightly connected with the productivity capabilities teams already use. It empowers employees to collaborate and share tips and ideas about how to improve the workplace.

Many large enterprises look for the benefits of cohesion an internal social network brings, but struggle to introduce it. Employees don’t want another tool that is poorly integrated with their workflow and forces them to pay attention. By deeply integrating in their productivity workflow, Nextcloud Social is in a unique position to deliver increased adoption of social networking in the enterprise.

This degree of integration explains why Nextcloud Social fits with our long term vision of providing large enterprises powerful collaboration and communication capabilities in an integrated, secure, compliant and extensible way.

For private users

By using the popular ActivityPub standard, Nextcloud users can subscribe to and share status updates with users in the so-called ‚fediverse‘, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers! This allows federation of Nextcloud servers with the popular decentralized Mastodon network, where tens of millions of users already ‚toot‘ with one another, potentially growing the fediverse by an order of magnitude. According to wikipedia, Peertube, Pleroma, Friendica and soon Diaspora are part of this same network, as are almost a dozen more communities. As every one of the hundreds of thousands of Nextcloud servers turns into a potential hub in the fediverse, we are very excited about the possibilities this will give our users to communicate with others!

follow what is happening on your timeline

find users on your or other servers

there is an emoji selector

Get started!

Version 0.1 alpha, a preview of the app, can easily be installed from the app store. It can connect to other servers in the fediverse, allowing users to subscribe to others and let others subscribe to their feed and share their thoughts. We plan on supporting the special API used by the many Mastodon clients so users can use those apps with their Nextcloud server in the future. Future releases will let you share images, locations and the many other features you are perhaps used to on other social networks. Get involved!

We hope you will enjoy the many improvements in Nextcloud 15! Find an overview of what has been improved in this series of blog posts:

• The full announcement
• Introducing Social networking to Nextcloud
• Next generation 2-factor authentication and security hardening
• Online Office goes mobile, Talk in the sidebar and improved sharing
• New grid view, PDF conversion, 2-3x faster loading, dashboard and more

The post Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse appeared first on Nextcloud.

Tweet showing NEC prototype with Nextcloud

We are excited to announce that through a partnership with NEC Platforms, Ltd. and Waffle Computer, Ltd., millions of routers will be equipped with Nextcloud, bringing secure, federated and private file exchange to their users. The global network of hundreds of thousands of Nextcloud servers, capable of seamlessly exchanging data with each other, will thus be extended by millions of new nodes over the course of several years.

Nextcloud Federation

With Nextcloud, everyone from home users to large enterprises, hospitals and government agencies can host their own, secure and private Dropbox or Office 365 alternative. Nextcloud offers easy to use web, desktop and mobile interfaces to sync files, share them with others and edit them on-the-go. By keeping data on a trusted server, users know where data is, who has access, and nothing leaks. As most most popular self-hosted file sync and collaboration technology with hundreds of thousands of servers on the web, Nextcloud is used by companies like SIEMENS, institutes like the German Federal government, research organizations like the Max-Planck-institute, financial enterprises like Raiffeisen and many more. Its combined number of users is estimated to be over 25 million globally.

Nextcloud servers are not alone. The Nextcloud Federation feature enables users from one Nextcloud server to share with users on another server, creating a globally spanning network of private, self-hosted clouds. A federated cloud id, comparable to an email address, enables users to identify one another, while servers also exchange address book data when authorized to do so.

Japan joining the Network

With the deployment of Nextcloud on the upcoming generation of routers from NEC Platforms, Ltd., the global network of federated Nextclouds will be expanding with millions of nodes, starting in Japan. This marks a significant step for Nextcloud and its users, bringing even greater momentum to the meteoric growth of Nextcloud.

NEC Platforms, Ltd. (https://www.necplatforms.co.jp/en/company/profile.html), is a subsidiary of NEC Corporation, and is also a leader in Japan broadband access market.

Waffle Computer, Ltd. is a Nextcloud partner in Japan, dedicated to bringing federated, decentralized computing to users across the globe and connecting major technology partners to make this happen.

We look forward to working with Nextcloud on expanding the file storage and exchange capabilities of our router solutions,

said Mr. Shinji Nakayama, Chief Manager at the Access-Device Development Division at NEC Platforms,Ltd.

The ability to federate between routers and form a global network enables our users to collaborate with others while staying in control over their data.

I believe routers are a great platform to bring self-hosted clouds into the house of millions of users,

said Frank Karlitschek, founder and managing director of Nextcloud GmbH.

It can be as easy and normal to have your own data at home as it is to own a television or mobile phone.

The collaboration with Nextcloud and NEC Platforms is very exciting,

said Masayuki Note, founder and owner of Waffle Computer, Ltd.

This collaboration can bring millions of users a private cloud solution, establishing a real alternative to centralized cloud providers.

Today, Nextcloud also announced Nextcloud 14 and our Simple Signup program.

The post Japan to add millions of new nodes to federated Nextcloud network appeared first on Nextcloud.

That push includes bringing the API to a stable, 1.0 version, suitable for wider implementation.

The Next Level

In his blog about the history and future of Cloud Federation, Bjoern mentioned ambitious goals and additions to federated sharing like sharing address books, calendars and real-time audio/video and chat communication across servers. With Nextcloud offering these features, the need for this is clear enough and the team is looking into the right way to do that. But such a project needs a solid foundation and bringing the OCM API to a solid 1.0 is very much a step that needs to be made.

Bjoern has been developing an extensive and detailed proposal for this, which can be found on github. It adds a number of basic abilities like distinguishing between sender and owner of a share (which helps with re-sharing), a simplification that allows users to share to display name instead of the complicated Federated Cloud ID, and a series of proposals to keep the protocol easy to maintain.

He also defined notifications and actually removed one of the capabilities of the API, GET requests, for privacy reasons.

An important element of this specification is that it is backward compatible so the hundreds of thousands of existing Nextcloud servers, as well as the many Pydio and ownCloud servers, can continue to be part of the federated network even when some start to upgrade to the new version!

A first implementation

This is, of course, a first draft, but code often speaks louder than specifications in open source, so Bjoern went ahead and developed an implementation in Nextcloud, which is already open for review.

Draft needs input!

It is now up to the stakeholders in the OCM community to provide their feedback and be part of the new 1.0 project. If you’re interested in federated technology, have a look at the API and share your thoughts!

The post Nextcloud pushes forward Open Cloud Mesh API with proposal for 1.0 release appeared first on Nextcloud.

Finance Cloud API, by Matthias Klees

Since last year, we have been developing the FINANCECLOUD API Idea (a protocol to launch financial and crypto services on), a fintech product accompanied by a cloud-device for the home network. In fact, the cloud device is the center of our concept.

We think, while decentralization is a good thing for services, “blockchain” is not always the right way. Functions are not well located in wallets, bound exclusively to any blockchain. Services shall be permissionless accessible for anyone and for any currency.

The cloud device runs the users cloud and gives access to services, via a simple app store, to enable easy crypto handling, trading and point-of-sales integration. It aims to make cryptocurrencies more accessible, easy and secure, whilst keeping the user in control. The app store is planned to act as a proxy between the user clouds and the service providers.

To make the functions accessible for any blockchain based currency, we are collaborating with the “Internet-of-Coins” team (see coinstorm.net), to use their just-finished hybrid protocol.

The device

Our Hardware Manager, Olaf Breuer is the ‘Makers Award’ winner 2017. He currently works at IBM Watson Lab in Germany. Our first prototype has been developed, to explain the idea to our potential investors. This “demo model” was based on a Raspberry PI. We are now about to finish the layout for our own circuit board, with hardware encryption chip inside. Our hardware development team is located in Portugal, where Olaf has his lab for electronic engineering and 3d-printing.

Cryptocurrencies turned into mainstream products

Very few cryptocurrency innovations have managed to transform into a mainstream product for non-crypto users. New users are always challenged to understand things like exchanges and payment processes. Even more confusing for them is, when it comes to understanding the environment as a whole and to identify good and trustworthy services or software. This is where we want to provide a pre-configured, hardware encrypted device for his home network. Users can plug it into their router and choose coins, exchanges and services from the app-store, and access all these innovations via one unified interface, without having to know about the technology behind it. You will be able to switch from „user mode“ to „professional-mode“ to do advanced operations.

Merchants can choose (via the app store) access to a pre-configured online-shop, that enables them, to accept over one hundred cryptocurrencies or they can bill directly via our payment gateway. We will perform the exchange for them if they want us to. The plan is that merchants adds our device as a “new credit card provider” while sticking with their system of choice.

For traders, it’s possible to see most exchanges under one single interface which they can choose from (via the app store). Traders will also find extended trade intelligence solutions and automation functions for cryptocurrencies, assets, and Forex via the “Expert Advisor Platform”, our first contractor, to be on the app store.

The cloud comes with a federation function. We would like to use this concept, to implement cloud-to-cloud federation, that enables businesses to connect their teams and to do financial collaboration on a project by project basis.

Though we have to extend some functionalities of the cloud system, we aim to stay 100% modular and compatible. Not only to provide our work to the Nextcloud community, but also to ensure freedom of choice for Financecloud Box users.

Benefits for the merchants

• One single device to accept any cryptocurrrency and handle them like a creditcardt payment in your chosen currency
• No interference: merchants can just stick with their Point-of-Sales system
• Merchants will generate additional sales if spending coins is easier

Benefits for users

• Easy crypto handling: users plug the box into their homenetwork and have all financial tasks under one single interface.
• New users don’t have to spend months, to find out about currencies, services and websites. They just add any service via the built-in app store
• The system can do universal transactions across different types of coins, a function that is not yet available anywhere else.
• Security: every service runs in an hardware encrypted container

If you want more info, you can learn more about the federated blockchains here!

The post Guest post: Federated Blockchains and the Financecloud API, by Matthias Klees appeared first on Nextcloud.

And indeed, you may already be using ActivityPub now without realizing it.

–Christopher Lemmer Webber

Nextcloud and ActivityPub

Nextcloud implements ActivityPub to inform users about changes to their files, new calendar and so on between users on different Nextcloud servers since Nextcloud 12. This makes ActivityPub part of what makes Nextcloud Global Scale work!

The Activity app which implements ActivityPub will continue to be improved, as its role has expanded over the years to inform users about a lot of things beyond file changes. Its core developer, Joas, blogged earlier about his todo list for the year, including changes to the Activity App.

Illustration of how ActivityPub works from W3.org

What is ActivityPub

The origins of ActivityPub trace back to microblogging technology StatusNet, the former Laconia which was first widely implemented at identi.ca. Identi.ca has since migrated to pump.io, the successor to OStatus and the protocol it implements is essentially the base of ActivityPub. Evan Prodromou, the original author of Laconia and pump.io, designed the new protocol to use Activity Streams for commands and transfer data via a simple REST inbox API. The best place to get started to learn more about the protocol is on the W3.org website.

Christopher Lemmer Webber wrote a guest post on the Free Software Foundation blog explaining some history and features of the protocol. It provides a server-server protocol for federation and a client-server protocol for users to connect to a server. The core idea of ActivityPub is to bring together decentralized social networks, gaining critical user mass while keeping data on separate servers.

The popular Twitter alternative Mastodon is a prominent user, same goes for Mediagoblin which aims more at sharing photos and videos. And, then, Nextcloud of course!

The post ActivityPub: the new standard for decentralized networks appeared first on Nextcloud.

What is Global Scale

Nextcloud is used by home users and small businesses as well as large organizations like universities, big companies or government agencies. Nextcloud 11 introduced significant performance improvements and combined with further work in 12 enables customers to deploy installations up to tens of thousands of users. Above that scale, however, federation has to be employed, requiring separate instances where users have to log in.

Global Scale was designed to overcome the limitations at large scale, but also to achieve other benefits. The main goals are these:

Scalability

Achieve several orders of magnitude greater scaling. It is hard to scale the standard architecture to instances over hundred thousand users. The shared components load balancers, hosting center uplink, database, storage and cache will sooner or later become bottlenecks. Especially the database is hard to scale beyond a 4 node Galera Cluster which limits the number of users and files. Nextcloud Global Scale aims to support up to hundreds of millions of users.

Cost efficiency

Several big Nextcloud users raised the issue that scaling the storage becomes exponentially more expensive when dealing with a high number of petabytes. Software-defined storage and object stores are unfortunately not a solution in reality. One of our Technical University customers estimated that 60% to 80% of the cost of running a file sync and share service is caused by the storage subsystem alone. It would significantly lower the total cost of ownership if the storage could be distributed over several smaller affordable storage systems. Similar cost issues exist with other pieces of the infrastructure like load balancers and databases where free or cheap solutions are not sufficient at large scale. Nextcloud Global Scale will enable the deployment on commodity hardware and software, dramatically decreasing costs for large systems.

Global distribution

A frequent need for large Nextcloud users is distributing data over multiple hosting centers in different countries or even continents. This can be due to legal requirements on where data is stored, to increase performance by bringing data closer to users or for cost, security or auditing reasons. With the current architecture, the choice is between a data replication solution for storage which hardly deals with most of these goals nor is fast and cost effective, or running multiple separate instances requiring users to log in in different portals. Nextcloud Global Scale will hide the existence of multiple data centers, making its architecture entirely transparent to users.

How does it work

Nextcloud Global Scale works by effectively removing the need for shared components in the existing architecture like the load balancers, hosting center uplink, database, storage, and cache. It uses multiple independent application servers, called nodes, each running on standard, inexpensive commodity hardware. Storage, database, and cache are running local on the application servers and no longer have to be kept in sync.

The Node

Nodes can be located in different data centers and be as small or large as any current Nextcloud instance. A sensible scale would be at least 2 machines, providing redundancy in case of hardware failure. The machines run a web server with TLS, Nextcloud, local storage, local database and local cache. The nodes use central remote logging and central authentication like, for example, LDAP. The nodes could be managed using a standard technology like Docker containers to ease deployment and maintenance.

Global Site Selector

The Global Site Selector (GSS) acts as a central instance that is accessed by the user during the first login, accessing it via the Web, WebDAV or REST. The GSS authenticates the user via the central user management like for example LDAP. It then looks up the node where the user is located in the lookup server and redirects the user to the right hostname. The following calls during the same session are done directly from client to the node.

Lookup Server

The lookup server stores the physical location of a user. It can be queried using a valid user id to fetch the federated sharing id of a user. In some situations, it is important to limit queries to a certain IP space to avoid data leaks. It also keeps track of old federated sharing IDs. The lookup server stores additional data of the users like for example the required QoS metrics like storage/quota settings, speed class, reliability class and so on.

Balancer

The Balancer runs on a dedicated machine, monitoring the various nodes and their storage, CPU, RAM and network utilization. It can mark nodes as online or offline and initiate the migration of user accounts to different nodes based on data in the Lookup Server like business or legal requirements, QoS settings or user location. If for example, a user would move from the US to Europe, the Balancer would initiate a migration from their data to an EU data center to improve the quality of service.

You can learn more details on our webpage about Global Scale.

Today: Nextcloud 12

Today, Nextcloud 12 is released and with it come the first components of Global Scale. It introduces federated activities so users can know what happened to their data, even if shared to another node; and we have implementations of the (stand alone) Lookup Server and a Global Site Selector app will be available for people interested in testing this in a few days. Work on user migration has started and we look to federate comments and release the Balancer over the coming months.

Need to scale? Contact us!

There is much more to Global Scale which our experienced engineering team will continue to develop and implement, working closely with customers, partners and of course our community.

If you are interested in the scaling and cost benefits or would like to explore the legal consequences of being able to decide where data resides, you can get in contact with our sales team.

Nextcloud continues to deliver impressive innovations. With GS, Nextcloud drives efficiency for cost-effective private cloud deployments to service internal and external customers which can be utilized while extending the service on a large scale.

— Florian Hausleitner, Senior IT System Engineer Datacenter Services at Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark.

What is Nextcloud?

Nextcloud offers an industry-leading fully open source solution for on-premise data handling and communication with an uncompromising focus on security and privacy and unprecedented scalability. Nextcloud brings together universal access to data with next-generation secure communication and collaboration capabilities under direct control of IT and integrated with existing compliant infrastructure. Nextcloud’s open, modular architecture, emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing assets within and across the borders of their organization. For more information, visit or follow @Nextclouders on Twitter.

The post Nextcloud announces Global Scale architecture as part of Nextcloud 12 appeared first on Nextcloud.

Enable TOTP

Today we release a beta of Nextcloud 10. This release brings a number of new features like new authentication protection mechanisms (including brute force protection and Two-Factor Authentication), improvements to federation, usability work and more. We’re also close to implementing the final pieces of enterprise functionality we promised, a task we will complete before the final release of Nextcloud 10.

Brute force protection and Two-factor auth

Authentication has gotten a serious overhaul, improving the security of your Nextcloud through brute force protection and two-factor authentication, features mainly developed by Lukas Reschke and Christoph Wurst (more details in Lukas’ blog).

Brute Force Protection logs invalid login attempts and slows down multiple attempts from a single IP address (or IPv6 range). This feature is enabled by default and protects against an attacker who tries to guess a password from one or more users.

TOTP in action

The login system now supports pluggable authentication. That includes two-factor authentication and device specific passwords, complete with a list of connected browsers and devices on the users‘ personal page. Users can also use their email address to log in.

Active sessions can now be invalidated through the list, by removing the user in the admin settings or by changing passwords and this also works for LDAP users. Admins can even enable or disable two-factor authentication for users on the command line.

For the final Nextcloud 10 release some more SAML work is being finalized. The clients don’t support two-factor authentication yet, something which is a work-in-progress. Device specific passwords can off course be used.

Federation

Bjoern and others continued to work on Federation (see his blog). Main improvements are a better handling of mounted link shares and reshares as well as more detailed permissions support.

Upgrade to test 10.0 Beta!

Since its inception in 2014 of server to server sharing, it has been possible to add a shared link to your Nextcloud instance. In Nextcloud 10, these will act like normal federated shares, that is, you can see who you shared with, change permissions and remove the shared link without removing the federated shares.

Another „make it more seamless“ improvement is that if you re-share federated shares, the servers make a direct connection rather than going via your server. This means faster and more reliable sharing!

Last but not least, federated shares now offer exactly the same type of permissions as normal shares in Nextcloud.

Usability updates

Text file preview

There has been usability work in various areas of Nextcloud like on the Files app and the theming abilities.

The Files app offers permanent links to files in the URL bar. That is, if you send the URL of a file on your Nextcloud to a colleague or friend you shared the file with, they can open the link you sent no matter where they have moved the shared file in their Nextcloud instance.

The Files app can also now show or hide hidden files, remember the sort order per user and will scroll the file list when you are dragging files to move them into another folder.

Previews of text files won’t be shown as unreadable small thumbnails but much bigger and last but not least, if you upload files, an estimate is given for how long the upload will take.

External storage

This release brings some updates to external storage, improving the performance and memory usage of the Dropbox and Google Drive support. Nextcloud 10 also introduces UTF-8 NFD encoding support for external storages. Last but not least, this release introduces support for SMB change notifications used in enterprise environments. This ensures changes on a Windows Network Drive will be quickly and without a big performance impact reflected in Nextcloud.

And more

There are a number of changes for developers which will enable better performance of the clients, enable them to define background jobs and repair steps and more.

The upgrade process has also undergone a number of improvements, showing better progress information and improving reliability but we’re still working in this area so more information will be in the final announcement.

We’re still working on a number of features and improvements, including some significant performance work for large instances. Help us test the beta and stay tuned for the final release!

As reminders, we’ve developed a docker image to bring Collabora Online to home users, you can of course test this with Nextcloud 10. And we also invite you all to our Nextcloud Conference, to help shape the future of Nextcloud!

Get the beta now

The post Beta of Nextcloud 10 with Two-Factor Authentication, Improved Federation and more appeared first on Nextcloud.