{"id":194097,"date":"2024-01-17T11:00:16","date_gmt":"2024-01-17T10:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcloud.com\/?p=194097"},"modified":"2024-09-06T14:53:28","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T12:53:28","slug":"nextcloud-global-scale-how-it-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcloud.com\/fr\/blog\/nextcloud-global-scale-how-it-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Nextcloud Global Scale: local data and limitless scalability at commodity cost"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Nextcloud<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Scaling file sync and share architectures from thousands to tens of thousands all the way to millions of users is a difficult task. Along the way, the dynamics of cost and performance change. Storage systems, database performance and data locality drain budget in different ways and at different scales. Nextcloud Global Scale is a solution designed to tackle this challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nextcloud Global Scale<\/a> offers an architecture that lets you host a 9-figure number of users with minimal latency, locality of data and dramatically reduced costs. Working on independent yet interconnected nodes, it is designed to provide a seamless federated user experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Global Scale in use<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Nextcloud Global Scale already services large deployments with tens of millions of users since 2017. One example is the Claro Drive offering from leading telecom company Am\u00e9rica M\u00f3vil<\/a>, which is designed to offer document access to over 20 million users, hosted across 4 data centers in two continents. Moreover, Global Scale is deployed to split data across several research and university networks including RENATER in France<\/a> and SUNET in Sweden<\/a> to give users a unified experience while petabytes of research data is handled efficiently and stays within the university where the research was conducted.<\/p>\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>

Alexandre Salvat<\/h6><\/cite>Drive Project Manager \u2013 P\u00f4le Projets Transverses et Innovation (P2TI)<\/span>Read the story<\/a><\/div> <\/blockquote>\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\r\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t
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Global Scale delivers autonomy with a single point of login that doesn’t require central user management. This lifts a major workload for the decentralized providers – clients stay in control of their users and data independently from the service administration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For continuously growing setups scalability is not limited: you can double, triple, and indefinitely scale the instance with more servers while delivering the same performance and connectivity in every location. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Limitations of standard architecture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Nextcloud is easily scalable with standard LAMP stack horizontal scaling technologies. However, on installations that service between tens and hundreds of thousands of users, some components eventually become bottlenecks that limit further scalability. In particular, large storage and database systems become exponentially expensive, though systems can scale into the millions of users before bottlenecks become apparent as Deutsche Telekom has shown with MagentaCloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, for compliance or performance reasons, there might be a desire to keep data in specific locations or closer to users.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Scalability limits<\/h4>

When aiming at over a million users, components like load balancers, databases, storage and cache, and datacenter uplink sooner or later won\u2019t be able to serve the required number of users and files.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

High storage costs<\/h4>

60 % to 80 % of the cost of running a file sync and share service is caused by the storage subsystem alone, while running one massive storage system is exponentially more expensive than several commodity systems.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

Legal and administrative issues<\/h4>

With different regional or department-specific requirements for data locality, security provisions and administration, centralized instance location is not an option. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

Poor global performance<\/h4>

Another reason to run a distributed instance is connectivity and bandwidth which may be a problem for a company with distant teams located in far proximity to the datacenter.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

Scale more, pay less<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Nextcloud Global Scale is aimed at tackling the limitations posed by the standard architecture. There are no central database, storage or caching instances, while the nodes are located independently and don\u2019t require fast connection between one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Free from the bottlenecks of the database and the file system, Global Scale delivers ultimately scalable and cost-efficient architecture:<\/p>\n\n\n\n