ownCloud Documentation Overview

What is Infinite Scale

Infinite Scale is a cloud-native microservices-based architecture and the latest generation of server applications. It does not depend on external software packages like PHP or a database which eliminates all the hassle that comes along with using them. With its modern architecture, Infinite Scale provides all deployment models for cloud infrastructure deployments and optimized scaling setups for the best output in return for the invested energy. With the single binary concept, managing the server is much more streamlined over all deployment methods.

With all the measures taken, security is greatly increased compared to a LAMP stack. For details read the page about Security Aspects of Infinite Scale.

Amongst many other features, the most notable benefits of ownCloud Infinite Scale are:

Spaces

Spaces are special folders made for teamwork.

Members of a space enjoy the service of a space manager, who takes care of enough quota and the right people added to a space. Thus a space is the ideal place where school classes, co-workers in business projects or other working groups collaborate. Spaces don’t "belong" to individual people, but are assigned to someone with the role of the space manager. For example, school classes can easily be handed over to the next teacher or organizations can transfer project responsibilities if an employee leaves the organization.

Usually space managers are, for example, project leaders or teachers. All in all, spaces make life easier for admins by giving space managers the ability of self-service.

ownCloud Web

ownCloud Web is bundled with Infinite Scale, has a new design and comes with a brand-new look. The goal is to make ownCloud accessible to all people from children to experts. Technically, ownCloud Web is built with VueJS as a dedicated client, communicating via well-formed APIs with the Infinite Scale server, just like all the other ownCloud clients. ownCloud Web can be used as an app for ownCloud Server but is limited in its capabilities. Nevertheless, switching to ownCloud Web makes a future migration to Infinite Scale easier for users as they are already used to the new UI. ownCloud Web can be customized according to your corporate identity via config values. For details see the Web UI configuration documentation.

Collaborative Editing

Editing with Microsoft Online Office 365, Collabora Office and OnlyOffice

Infinite Scale comes with a ramped-up WOPI protocol server that provides collaborative office document editing with multiple users. It supports Microsoft Online Office 365, Collabora Office and OnlyOffice out of the box and is ready to support more collaborative editors in the near future. With the focus on seamless collaboration, files are locked when opened in an online editor to show others that they are in use and likely to change.

In Infinite Scale, we drastically simplified sharing by links. First of all: You can get a link with a single click in ownCloud Web. Second: You can share one and the same link with internal and external people at once, and if you change your mind, you can restrict access, for example, to only internal people of your organization. This feature was known as "private link" in ownCloud 10 and is still available but via the "internal" selection of a link.

Cloud Native Deployments

Infinite Scale is a platform built of independent microservices that communicate over the highly efficient gRPC protocol internally and provide HTTP APIs externally. That gives the flexibility for easy extension, integration and deployment of the entire platform.

For the sake of efficiency, Infinite Scale reduces dependencies and works without a traditional database. This saves administration efforts, hardware resources, attack vectors and energy.

One of the biggest benefits of Infinite Scale is the variety of deployment models that make the rollout of the platform really easy and independent of the underlying infrastructure as much as possible.

Infinite Scale can be delivered as Local Production Setup.

With that, Infinite Scale provides a deployment model for modern cloud infrastructure deployments and optimized scaling setups to achieve the best output in return for the invested energy.

Infinite Scale Features

Category Component Comment

Storage

Local (POSIX)

“ocis” driver (“decomposedfs”), the default filesystem for Infinite Scale

NFS (POSIX)

“ocis” driver (“decomposedfs”), the default filesystem for Infinite Scale

S3

“s3ng” driver; with decomposedfs for metadata (POSIX)

ownCloud 10 SQL storage driver

Needed for parallel deployments with ownCloud 10 and for migration purposes

Users & IDM

Integrated, lightweight user & group management (LibreIDM)

Out-of-the-box integrated user & group management; can be replaced with external LDAP

OIDC (LibreConnect)

OpenID Connect for user authentication and single sign-on based on an integrated identity provider; can be replaced with external identity providers

User roles system

Define user roles based on permissions to create a segregation of duties in administration as well as to distinguish user types

LDAP integration

Integrate an external LDAP/AD user directory

Content Collaboration

File management (upload / download / rename / copy / move / delete / etc.)

Ability for users to conduct basic file and folder operations as well as synchronization with clients

Sharing / access management (permissions on data)

Ability for users to share files and folders with users, groups and via links

Spaces

User-independent project and team folders with multiple owners and dedicated behavior

Deleted files / trash bin

Ability for users to restore deleted files