Nextcloud and Collabora scale real-time collaboration to hundreds of millions of users

We’re happy to announce the result of a collaborative effort to make Collabora Online available to customers with tens of millions of users through our innovative Nextcloud Global Scale architecture. The technological advancements also benefit distributed, federated private clouds, enabling cross-cloud collaboration between separate Nextcloud servers that have files shared between them.

Global Scale has been in production since 2017 in a commercial setup for tens of millions of users across 4 continents. Several other customers have deployed or began experimenting with Global Scale in the last years. Thanks to the new integration, Collabora Online installations at multi-million user scale are now set to roll out.

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) – RENATER

Global Scale for the largest installations

As a mature and real world tested solution, Nextcloud Global Scale offers Nextcloud customers a way out of traditional, costly scalability limitations like data center uplinks, load balancers and database, storage and cache. Global Scale enables virtually limitless scalability of Nextcloud deployments at high cost efficiency by transparently distributing users across multiple nodes. This takes away the need for a central database, storage and cache solution, enabling individual nodes to take advantage of inexpensive commodity hardware to save costs and increase flexibility. Single production nodes have already shown to scale to 250.000 users as part of a larger Global Scale setup. Even the limitations of a single data center in terms of capacity and up-link do not limit the size of a Global Scale deployment, as nodes can be in any location. This also allows installations to improve performance by moving data closer to the physical location of users or enforce strict data locality rules to comply with legal or security requirements.

As the market demands every deeper integration of content collaboration technology, partnering with a leading document collaboration provider like Collabora Productivity is the best way to deliver our customers the solution they need. Globally active, demanding enterprises require excellent, real-world tested and truly scalable solutions only our partnership offers.

– Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud GmbH

Collabora Online integration

Within a Global Scale architecture, enhancements to Collabora allow users from different nodes to transparently collaborate in a single document editing session. This means a combined Nextcloud Global Scale + Collabora instance can deliver real-time document editing at a truly global scale, with users collaborating across data centers, countries and continents.

As Collabora proceeds to deliver its document editing solutions to exceedingly large enterprises, we are excited to collaborate with a proven scalability leader like Nextcloud. This is vital to meet the needs of big organizations. Large scale deployments require reliable service combined with the excellent user experience our partnership provides.

– Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity.

For home users

Private users and smaller installations also benefit from the improvements to Nextcloud Global Scale and Collabora Online, gaining the ability to collaborate on documents they have shared between their private clouds. This federation feature, invented by Nextcloud team members and standardized under the Open Cloud Mesh OCS standard, lets users share files between different servers as easy as sending an email. With the latest version of the Collabora Online Nextcloud integration app, users will be able to work directly with others on files that are shared between Nextcloud instances.

Several customers are expected to roll out Collabora Online in a Global Scale context, supported by Nextcloud and Collabora. For more information about a Global Scale deployment, contact Nextcloud GmbH.