Happy birthday, Nextcloud!

This month, Nextcloud turns one year! While we built on a long history, it is nice to look back at what we accomplished in the last 12 months since we officially launched.

The start

When we launched Nextcloud, on June 2 2016, we made it clear that we had one primary goal: provide a private cloud for everyone. It was the core of our work, and it still is.

We’re serious about the private part. Privacy is only made possible by focusing on security, and security is immensely important for us. This is why one of our first actions was to reboot the HackerOne program, offering 10x more than we used to for anyone who managed to find a serious vulnerability in our code. And, in December, we had the experts at the NCC Group review our security processes. We also wanted to help everyone ensuring that they ran a secure instance: we launched the Nextcloud Private Cloud Security Scan in March this year.

We’re serious about the cloud part. The cloud is where you collaborate and communicate today. So we integrated audio/video calls when we launched, added online office integration with Collabora and introduced a lot of improvements to sharing and collaboration features in Nextcloud 12.

We’re serious about the everyone part. We’re ambitious and want to move fast so we can cater for the needs of a wide range of users. This is only possible by working with our community, building a real, collaborative, open project. We targeted home users with the Nextcloud box, making it easier than ever to get a private cloud up and running. And with Global Scale, we cater to the largest of the largest deployments, delivering unprecedented performance at HUGE scale.

Stability

We moved quick and Nextcloud 9 was released just 2 weeks after we launched. We initially planned for mid July but the demand was big and more importantly, it was possible to pull this off because we received a lot of help!

Nextcloud 10 proved we could deliver a reliable, stable product, making big strides in old pain points of upgrading and showing the reliability of “.o” releases. And as part of this, we delivered enterprise capabilities – free and open. In the mean time, we had kicked off our bug bounty program, partnered with OpenCloudMesh and Collabora and organized 2 hackweeks. The first Nextcloud Conference was our next achievement, and over 100 participants witnessed announcement of the Nextcloud Box!

Of course, we launched the Android and iOS clients, announced our first big customer and much more…

Then came December. First, we hit two important milestones:

• Nextcloud became the most active open source file sync and share project
• Nextcloud GmbH became a profitable company

Being a healthy, growing community backed by a healthy, growing company (over 30 employees now!) is of course a great accomplishment, certainly when achieved in only 6 months after getting started.

Then came Nextcloud 11, a release which made some huge steps forward for private file sync and share technology. Nextcloud 11 was focused on two aspects: security, introducing many new security protections, and scalability, with a big step forward for large deployments. We were also beginning to pay attention to collaboration, introducing full text search and built-in, still experimental video calls. It quickly solidified a reputation of being a rock solid release, setting a new standard in reliability and smooth, easy upgrades.

By the end of the year, we had built a very, very solid base in all areas: community, company and product.

Growth and leadership

Where 2016 was about getting solid footing, 2017 has so far been about leading the way! Nextcloud 11 has put us ahead of our competition and this year we extended that lead significantly by implementing significant steps in our vision towards a more collaborative future. Security continues to be a core value of Nextcloud as the introduction of our Private Cloud Security Scanner and our recent update on our successful Security Bug Bounty program show. We’ve also visited several dozens of events over the last months, continued to grow our list of partners (over 20) and providers (over 50!). But we also look at the future, by integrating with innovative technologies like the blockchain storage tech Sia.

Of course, the biggest step forward was Nextcloud 12 which featured hundreds of improvements over its 6-month development cycle. It redefined File Sync and Share with communication and collaboration capabilities while also introducing new security hardenings, authentication features and much more.

As part of Nextcloud 12, we introduced our new Global Scale architecture which enables far larger Nextcloud instances with up to hundreds of millions of users but also brings cost savings to smaller instances and features for home users. This architecture represents a whole new level for open source file sync and share, placing it in a position to compete with large, proprietary solutions and we’re working to get it implemented at this scale.

Great future

It has been a crazy ride for us and we continue to be humbled by the support and encouragement we receive from our users. Following social media we can see how people appreciate the improvements we have made in stability, performance and capabilities, and we want to thank everyone for their kind words.

We’re very proud of the progress we have made since we started Nextcloud and look forward to continuing to serve our users, customers and partners better than ever before!