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EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

155 points by jkire 7y ago

dafty4 7y ago
Could this be the next MiniTel in the making?
- frenchman99 7y ago
  Minitel was based on another protocol. Nextcloud reuses current technology and provides open source interfaces. So, the difference between the internet and the minitel is nothing like the difference between Nextcloud and American alternatives (Dropbox & Co).
  - gcbw3 7y ago
    > Minitel was based on another protocol. everything was 'based on another protocol' before x25 :D i think that just like Minitel was one of many services that used the banal packet switching tech at the time, nextcloud is just another banal cloud offering. What is interesting is what will happen soon: truly distributed networks will be for [aws/nextcloud/etc] what the internet was for [minitel/dec/telenet/bbs] users.
wil421 7y ago
Do EU governments not have something like FedRamp? I work on a popular SaaS product for enterprises. At my last job I supported a managed service provider who was going after some federal IT outsourcing business. AWS has FedRamp instances in DCs no one else uses. Same with the SaaS system I work on. They had all kinds of restrictions including only allowing US Citizens to access the systems.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- compuguy 7y ago
  You're referring to AWS's GovCloud regions, right (https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/)? I also believe Microsoft has a eqivalent product (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/government/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/gove...)
  - wil421 7y ago
    Yes, FedRamp is the certification. GovCloud is FedRamp certified AWS.
groundlogic 7y ago
France/Netherlands/Sweden/Germany is an interesting mix. (Edit: removed incorrect information.)
- pergadad 7y ago
  It's not an EU project, it's individual governments making long-term infrastructure decisions. Just like the French gov chose matrix for internal communication. Sadly there has been no national move to Linux as desktop OS for staff yet, but quite a few lower level initiatives. Those lower level ones obviously have less resources and more fluctuation, but shifting 300k federal employees to a new storage provider will not be a frequent decision.
- addicted 7y ago
  NextCloud was an independent company well before it did anything government related. The only thing that's happening here is they appear to have struck a huge contract with a few EU countries to build internal clouds. I believe NextCloud is open source, and a fork of owncloud from the original owncloud developer who wasn't happy with the direction it was taking, or something like that. Also, they are a profitable company, and the product is open source, so this only looks like a boost to their business model and the open source product it's based on.
  - groundlogic 7y ago
    Ah, I see. Perhaps not as bad as first thought, then!
- Eric_WVGG 7y ago
  Nextcloud has been around since 2010 (insert boring digression about a fork here). Dunno what your threshold for abandonment is, but that’s already a better shelf-life than most profit-driven startups.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
The recent changes to Dropbox incited me to finally build a home NAS/personal-cloud server based on Nextcloud last month. My first impressions were a bit negative, as I was expecting "open source Dropbox" and nothing more; Nextcloud actually does quite a lot, which made me think it was bloatware. This is due to my ignorance and jumping in too fast. What Nextcloud actually is: a personal Dropbox-style server, with open source equivalents of Google Docs, calendaring, contacts, notepads, and a complete "app store". It's all really well built, and you can use as much (or in my case, as little) as you feel like. I thought I'd use none of these apps at all, until I realized that I would really like a Del.icio.us-style [bookmarking app](https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/bookmarks https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/bookmarks), but had no desire to shop around and adopt something that required a fee or might disappear later. At this point, my only criticisms are that I think the installation should be more idiot-friendly, and the UI smells of 2012. For anyone interested in following suit, I picked up an [Odroid-HC1](https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/) (a bit like a Raspberry Pi, but much higher disk and network performance, at a similar price point) and [NextcloudPi](https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/#download https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/#download) (complete Debian + Nextcloud image). It went swimmingly and cost well under a hundred bucks, not counting the 3.5" hard drive. Nextcloud is backed by a corporation that mostly makes its money off support for the German gov't? I think it's an ideal solution for any municipality, non-profit, or small-to-large sized company that for whatever reason doesn't want to go with a commercial cloud.
- addicted 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I've been interested in creating my own setup, and I was wondering if you've setup an off-prem backup solution, and what you're using for that?
  - glup 7y ago
    I have a cron job that copies the internal drive to an (encrypted) USB drive every night, and about every 3 months I sneakernet it to an offsite location (eg my parents' house in another state) and bring back the previously-stashed drive. It's nice to know my data is in multiple places I trust, and not plugged in. I also do a lot of digital photography (~1TB/year) so it's cheaper than cloud solutions (at least last I checked)
kissgyorgy 7y ago
I'm so happy to see this, I'm a huge fan of Nextcloud since I switched from Dropbox and couldn't been happier. I never seen such a high quality PHP project, it's really simple to operate and upgrade!
Havoc 7y ago
Glad to see nextcloud getting more punchy support. Could be a big plus for everyone doing self hosting stuff
nominated1 7y ago
Do EU Governments care about security? Has a proper audit of this monstrosity been done? Or is this just another ploy to get better pricing?
- cafxx 7y ago
  Sounds like someone didn't bother reading the linked page...
  - nominated1 7y ago
    Those quotes read like typical PR statements made by politicians. I was hoping for a bit more. I can’t find it now but it wasn’t long ago that the NextCloud (or was it OwnCloud) FAQ had a note about security that read something like “we’re busy adding features we’ll get to security later”. It left me feeling uneasy. I would have hoped security would have been part of the design. Maybe I’m just getting old...
    - jospoortvliet 7y ago
      Things have changed a fair bit since the early ownCloud days - you'll be hard pressed to find a large PHP app with so few security issues, and that's not me saying that but quoting a pentest firm hired by the Swiss city of Geneva which audited Nextcloud recently. See https://nextcloud.com/secure https://nextcloud.com/secure - thoughts are, of course, always welcome.
      - jospoortvliet 7y ago
        Actually, we already quoted them in an earlier blog: https://nextcloud.com/blog/a-wave-of-cities-all-over-europe-moving-to-nextcloud/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/a-wave-of-cities-all-over-europe-... ;-)
- codedokode 7y ago
  Where is information stored securely? On a private server not accessible from outside and protected by law or on foreign publicly accessible servers not protected by local laws?
LinuxBender 7y ago
Nextcloud is really cool. A coworker had initially set it up for an in-house place for our team to store more sensitive things that we didn't want floating around on confluence or google docs. It didn't last long. The legal team didn't like the AGPL license and we had to abandon the project. Too bad really, the interface is very nice and the file level encryption was a big plus.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Why would the legal team care about the license in this case?
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    Fear. I think they are over-cautious. They don't want AGPL code running in an environment that could be perceived as part of our customer environment.
    - jospoortvliet 7y ago
      They should contact us - Nextcloud GmbH. A contract with us contains all indemnification they could ever want, so it should not be an issue at all. (A)GPL is used in a countless business environments, they're tried-and-true licenses that have been proven to be pro-customer. Especially if you have a proper vendor contract it's actually a huge advantage over the various vendor licenses and their often heavy-handed anti-user clauses.
wtdata 7y ago
I used Nextcloud for more than one year, but in the end I found it too bloated for my usage and I kept having problems with some outstanding bugs in it. I finally moved to Syncthing one year ago and never had to configure anything else. I have it running in a docker container that gets automatically updated and needed zero configuration since then. It's also much faster at syncronizing files than Nextcloud was, and doesn't need a central repository. If you don't need Nextcloud fancy features and just want a Dropbox self hosted alternative, Syncthing should be the way to go. https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zepearl 7y ago
Just asking: the new plans of "Owncloud" won't have any repercussion on "Nextcloud", right? Question based on 1) the fact that Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud and 2) this post... https://owncloud.com/owncloud-infinite-scale-owncloud-unveils-new-architecture-for-unlimited-scalability/ https://owncloud.com/owncloud-infinite-scale-owncloud-unveil... ...as reported e.g. here (I had problems loading the above page): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.golem.de/news/infinite-scale-owncloud-aendert-grundlegend-seine-architektur-1907-142723.html&prev=search https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https:/... Meaning: Nextcloud won't follow a similar direction, right? Thx
- jospoortvliet 7y ago
  First of all, we forked 3 years ago and have progressed very fast since then - there is, from what I know, no code going between the two code bases since 2 years or so. Second, there is simply no reason to rewrite everything from scratch. We know our code base well enough to be able to maintain and keep driving it forward. Nextcloud can already scale to hundreds of millions of users. See nextcloud.com/globalscale - GS is in production since 2017 and at at least one customer, some nodes have shown to scale to 250K users, as part of a larger architecture designed for tens of millions. We have about a half dozen other customers using GS or working on deployments, and some in proof-of-concept stage. In short, we have no plans to change a working, proven architecture which actually scales from Raspberry Pi to a global deployment for something which actually doesn't do either of those.
  - zepearl 7y ago
    Great, this makes me happy:) Thanks a lot for mentioning the interesting details!
novaRom 7y ago
I first thought it's about a new competitor for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. A bit misleading headline. According to Wikipedia: Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. More properly would be to say: cloud storage. It's very bad Europe has no its own public cloud yet. All universities, schools, research centers, public services can be much more efficient and secure than now. But they will probably fall again into the same trap like it happened with Windows and other proprietary garbage before. Will it be AWS or Azure this time?
- claudius 7y ago
  A fair number of universities and research institutes already use Nextcloud, e.g. the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility offers a Nextcloud installation for all users and TU Berlin also offers one for all of its students. There's no reason for these things to live in a "public cloud", whatever that means, self-hosting them is much more efficient, privacy friendly and secure (if only by compartmentalising).
shreyshrey 7y ago
We(FileCloud) compete with NextCloud in Self-Hosted EFSS space and part of Gartner MQ. We are seeing more and more government customers are asking for solutions that offer complete control over their data. We have large government and education customers in switzerland and Denmark.
olliej 7y ago
Alternatively "Countries that aren't the US choose not to work with US companies or subsidiaries because the US gov. has stated that foreign subsidiaries are still beholden to US law over the local law, and the US constitution does not apply to foreigners". It's not just "independence" it's literally: you cannot trust a US [owned] company because the US government has said it that US law governs any foreign subsidiaries. Because they're now magically subject to US law they have to comply with the patriot act, which is already unconstitutional. But that doesn't matter as the US Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the constitution does not apply to foreigners. Therefore they don't even need the patriot act: foreigners don't get the 4th amendment. If you were the leader of some country, and there was another country acting that way, would you ever want to store any of your information, or rely on services provided by, a company subject to such rules?
SanchoPanda 7y ago
The new dashboard app/widget dock looks great. Looks like it's a totally different app from the old unmaintained one which got buggy and then low ratings, but the new dev kept that listing and is working to get it back up. Playing life on expert mode, respect.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
If nothing else another player in the market is a good idea. To get government contracts, they would have had meet stringent security standards, it would interesting to know what level they are compliant to.

155 points by jkire 7y ago

dafty4 7y ago

Could this be the next MiniTel in the making?

frenchman99 7y ago
Minitel was based on another protocol. Nextcloud reuses current technology and provides open source interfaces. So, the difference between the internet and the minitel is nothing like the difference between Nextcloud and American alternatives (Dropbox & Co).
- gcbw3 7y ago
  > Minitel was based on another protocol. everything was 'based on another protocol' before x25 :D i think that just like Minitel was one of many services that used the banal packet switching tech at the time, nextcloud is just another banal cloud offering. What is interesting is what will happen soon: truly distributed networks will be for [aws/nextcloud/etc] what the internet was for [minitel/dec/telenet/bbs] users.

wil421 7y ago

Do EU governments not have something like FedRamp? I work on a popular SaaS product for enterprises. At my last job I supported a managed service provider who was going after some federal IT outsourcing business. AWS has FedRamp instances in DCs no one else uses. Same with the SaaS system I work on. They had all kinds of restrictions including only allowing US Citizens to access the systems.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
compuguy 7y ago
You're referring to AWS's GovCloud regions, right (https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/)? I also believe Microsoft has a eqivalent product (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/government/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/gove...)
- wil421 7y ago
  Yes, FedRamp is the certification. GovCloud is FedRamp certified AWS.

groundlogic 7y ago

France/Netherlands/Sweden/Germany is an interesting mix. (Edit: removed incorrect information.)

pergadad 7y ago
It's not an EU project, it's individual governments making long-term infrastructure decisions. Just like the French gov chose matrix for internal communication. Sadly there has been no national move to Linux as desktop OS for staff yet, but quite a few lower level initiatives. Those lower level ones obviously have less resources and more fluctuation, but shifting 300k federal employees to a new storage provider will not be a frequent decision.
addicted 7y ago
NextCloud was an independent company well before it did anything government related. The only thing that's happening here is they appear to have struck a huge contract with a few EU countries to build internal clouds. I believe NextCloud is open source, and a fork of owncloud from the original owncloud developer who wasn't happy with the direction it was taking, or something like that. Also, they are a profitable company, and the product is open source, so this only looks like a boost to their business model and the open source product it's based on.
- groundlogic 7y ago
  Ah, I see. Perhaps not as bad as first thought, then!
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
Nextcloud has been around since 2010 (insert boring digression about a fork here). Dunno what your threshold for abandonment is, but that’s already a better shelf-life than most profit-driven startups.

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

The recent changes to Dropbox incited me to finally build a home NAS/personal-cloud server based on Nextcloud last month. My first impressions were a bit negative, as I was expecting "open source Dropbox" and nothing more; Nextcloud actually does quite a lot, which made me think it was bloatware. This is due to my ignorance and jumping in too fast. What Nextcloud actually is: a personal Dropbox-style server, with open source equivalents of Google Docs, calendaring, contacts, notepads, and a complete "app store". It's all really well built, and you can use as much (or in my case, as little) as you feel like. I thought I'd use none of these apps at all, until I realized that I would really like a Del.icio.us-style [bookmarking app](https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/bookmarks https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/bookmarks), but had no desire to shop around and adopt something that required a fee or might disappear later. At this point, my only criticisms are that I think the installation should be more idiot-friendly, and the UI smells of 2012. For anyone interested in following suit, I picked up an [Odroid-HC1](https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/) (a bit like a Raspberry Pi, but much higher disk and network performance, at a similar price point) and [NextcloudPi](https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/#download https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/#download) (complete Debian + Nextcloud image). It went swimmingly and cost well under a hundred bucks, not counting the 3.5" hard drive. Nextcloud is backed by a corporation that mostly makes its money off support for the German gov't? I think it's an ideal solution for any municipality, non-profit, or small-to-large sized company that for whatever reason doesn't want to go with a commercial cloud.

addicted 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I've been interested in creating my own setup, and I was wondering if you've setup an off-prem backup solution, and what you're using for that?
- glup 7y ago
  I have a cron job that copies the internal drive to an (encrypted) USB drive every night, and about every 3 months I sneakernet it to an offsite location (eg my parents' house in another state) and bring back the previously-stashed drive. It's nice to know my data is in multiple places I trust, and not plugged in. I also do a lot of digital photography (~1TB/year) so it's cheaper than cloud solutions (at least last I checked)

kissgyorgy 7y ago

I'm so happy to see this, I'm a huge fan of Nextcloud since I switched from Dropbox and couldn't been happier. I never seen such a high quality PHP project, it's really simple to operate and upgrade!

Havoc 7y ago

Glad to see nextcloud getting more punchy support. Could be a big plus for everyone doing self hosting stuff

nominated1 7y ago

Do EU Governments care about security? Has a proper audit of this monstrosity been done? Or is this just another ploy to get better pricing?

cafxx 7y ago
Sounds like someone didn't bother reading the linked page...
- nominated1 7y ago
  Those quotes read like typical PR statements made by politicians. I was hoping for a bit more. I can’t find it now but it wasn’t long ago that the NextCloud (or was it OwnCloud) FAQ had a note about security that read something like “we’re busy adding features we’ll get to security later”. It left me feeling uneasy. I would have hoped security would have been part of the design. Maybe I’m just getting old...
  - jospoortvliet 7y ago
    Things have changed a fair bit since the early ownCloud days - you'll be hard pressed to find a large PHP app with so few security issues, and that's not me saying that but quoting a pentest firm hired by the Swiss city of Geneva which audited Nextcloud recently. See https://nextcloud.com/secure https://nextcloud.com/secure - thoughts are, of course, always welcome.
    - jospoortvliet 7y ago
      Actually, we already quoted them in an earlier blog: https://nextcloud.com/blog/a-wave-of-cities-all-over-europe-moving-to-nextcloud/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/a-wave-of-cities-all-over-europe-... ;-)
codedokode 7y ago
Where is information stored securely? On a private server not accessible from outside and protected by law or on foreign publicly accessible servers not protected by local laws?

LinuxBender 7y ago

Nextcloud is really cool. A coworker had initially set it up for an in-house place for our team to store more sensitive things that we didn't want floating around on confluence or google docs. It didn't last long. The legal team didn't like the AGPL license and we had to abandon the project. Too bad really, the interface is very nice and the file level encryption was a big plus.

Aeolun 7y ago
Why would the legal team care about the license in this case?
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Fear. I think they are over-cautious. They don't want AGPL code running in an environment that could be perceived as part of our customer environment.
  - jospoortvliet 7y ago
    They should contact us - Nextcloud GmbH. A contract with us contains all indemnification they could ever want, so it should not be an issue at all. (A)GPL is used in a countless business environments, they're tried-and-true licenses that have been proven to be pro-customer. Especially if you have a proper vendor contract it's actually a huge advantage over the various vendor licenses and their often heavy-handed anti-user clauses.

wtdata 7y ago

I used Nextcloud for more than one year, but in the end I found it too bloated for my usage and I kept having problems with some outstanding bugs in it. I finally moved to Syncthing one year ago and never had to configure anything else. I have it running in a docker container that gets automatically updated and needed zero configuration since then. It's also much faster at syncronizing files than Nextcloud was, and doesn't need a central repository. If you don't need Nextcloud fancy features and just want a Dropbox self hosted alternative, Syncthing should be the way to go. https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zepearl 7y ago

Just asking: the new plans of "Owncloud" won't have any repercussion on "Nextcloud", right? Question based on 1) the fact that Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud and 2) this post... https://owncloud.com/owncloud-infinite-scale-owncloud-unveils-new-architecture-for-unlimited-scalability/ https://owncloud.com/owncloud-infinite-scale-owncloud-unveil... ...as reported e.g. here (I had problems loading the above page): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.golem.de/news/infinite-scale-owncloud-aendert-grundlegend-seine-architektur-1907-142723.html&prev=search https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https:/... Meaning: Nextcloud won't follow a similar direction, right? Thx

jospoortvliet 7y ago
First of all, we forked 3 years ago and have progressed very fast since then - there is, from what I know, no code going between the two code bases since 2 years or so. Second, there is simply no reason to rewrite everything from scratch. We know our code base well enough to be able to maintain and keep driving it forward. Nextcloud can already scale to hundreds of millions of users. See nextcloud.com/globalscale - GS is in production since 2017 and at at least one customer, some nodes have shown to scale to 250K users, as part of a larger architecture designed for tens of millions. We have about a half dozen other customers using GS or working on deployments, and some in proof-of-concept stage. In short, we have no plans to change a working, proven architecture which actually scales from Raspberry Pi to a global deployment for something which actually doesn't do either of those.
- zepearl 7y ago
  Great, this makes me happy:) Thanks a lot for mentioning the interesting details!

novaRom 7y ago

I first thought it's about a new competitor for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. A bit misleading headline. According to Wikipedia: Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. More properly would be to say: cloud storage. It's very bad Europe has no its own public cloud yet. All universities, schools, research centers, public services can be much more efficient and secure than now. But they will probably fall again into the same trap like it happened with Windows and other proprietary garbage before. Will it be AWS or Azure this time?

claudius 7y ago
A fair number of universities and research institutes already use Nextcloud, e.g. the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility offers a Nextcloud installation for all users and TU Berlin also offers one for all of its students. There's no reason for these things to live in a "public cloud", whatever that means, self-hosting them is much more efficient, privacy friendly and secure (if only by compartmentalising).

shreyshrey 7y ago

We(FileCloud) compete with NextCloud in Self-Hosted EFSS space and part of Gartner MQ. We are seeing more and more government customers are asking for solutions that offer complete control over their data. We have large government and education customers in switzerland and Denmark.

olliej 7y ago

Alternatively "Countries that aren't the US choose not to work with US companies or subsidiaries because the US gov. has stated that foreign subsidiaries are still beholden to US law over the local law, and the US constitution does not apply to foreigners". It's not just "independence" it's literally: you cannot trust a US [owned] company because the US government has said it that US law governs any foreign subsidiaries. Because they're now magically subject to US law they have to comply with the patriot act, which is already unconstitutional. But that doesn't matter as the US Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the constitution does not apply to foreigners. Therefore they don't even need the patriot act: foreigners don't get the 4th amendment. If you were the leader of some country, and there was another country acting that way, would you ever want to store any of your information, or rely on services provided by, a company subject to such rules?

SanchoPanda 7y ago

The new dashboard app/widget dock looks great. Looks like it's a totally different app from the old unmaintained one which got buggy and then low ratings, but the new dev kept that listing and is working to get it back up. Playing life on expert mode, respect.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago

If nothing else another player in the market is a good idea. To get government contracts, they would have had meet stringent security standards, it would interesting to know what level they are compliant to.