from dengtav@lemmy.ml to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 12 Apr 08:44
https://lemmy.ml/post/28485942
As Nextcloud advanced with progresses making it competitive in fully integrated government and corporate workflows, OpenCloud is getting more and more attention.
The fact, that both are collaborative cloud plattforms, designed to be selfhosted and mainly developed in/around Berlin from FOSS-Community-Surroundings, makes one ask about the differences.
The main difference I see, is the software stack
- Nextcloud, as a fork of ownCloud, kept the PHP code base and is still mainly developing in PHP
- OpenCloud, also a fork of ownCloud, did a complete rewrite in Go
Until know, Nextcloud is far more feature complete (yes I know, people complain, they should fix more bugs instead of bringing new features) than OpenCloud, if we compair it with comercial cometitors like MS Teams.
I like Nextcloud!
I deploy it for various groups, teams, associations, when ever they need something where they want to have fileshare, calendar, contacts and tasks in one place. Almost every time, when I show them the functionality of Nextcloud Groups an the sharing-possibilities, people are thrilled about it, because they didn’t expect such a feature rich tool. Although I sometimes wish it would be more performant and easier to maintain, so non-tech-people could care for their hosting themselves.
Why OpenCloud?
Now, with OpenCloud, I am asking my self, why not just contribute to the existing colab-cloud project Nextcloud. Why do your own thing?
Questions
So here I expect the Go as a somewhat game-changer (?). As you may have noticed, that I am not a developer or programmer, so maybe there are obvious advantages of that.
- Will OpenCloud, at some point, outreach Nextclouds feature completeness and performance, thanks to a more modern approach with Go?
- Will Nextcloud with their huge php stack run into problems in the future, because they cant compete with more modern architectures?
- If you would have to deploy a selfhosted cloud environment for a ~500 people organization lasting long term: Would you stick to the goo old working php stack or see possible advantages in the future of the OpenCloud approach?
Thanks :)
threaded - newest
I have no experience with Opencloud, but Nextcloud is borderline unmaintainable in my opinion. I welcome any new player in this space.
Yeah, I love NC but boy is it a pain. If there were a similar but less bulky, less clunky option that wasn't a pain to maintain, I'd be all over that.
I wish there was something that just did file sync.
I know there’s syncthing but that’s not ideal for large repositories with many users and many files.
Yeah, I'm more or less just using NC for a cloud storage with WebDAV. I don't really need all the other bits. So if NC were modular in that you could install or not the core pieces, that would be great.
Nextcloud’s biggest issue is performance, and PHP, while not a problem per se, doesn’t help. PHP is not designed for huge applications that need to have processes running in the background; it only runs when a request is made then stops the process, therefore it needs to load itself from scratch on every single page load.
This is because PHP uses something called CGI; the webserver (usually nginx or Apache) calls an external PHP binary to generate a page. With Go (or pretty much any other language), the app is its own server and can keep data in memory and do stuff even when no request is coming.
Isn’t Opencloud just extended Nextcloud? (Still PHP)
nextcloud.com/…/opencloud-the-digitally-sovereign…
Also, nextcloud core components are written in Rust, the PHP just handles incoming requests.
nextcloud.com/…/nextcloud-faster-than-ever-introd…
There is so much wrong with this that it’s difficult to know where to start…
PHP does actually scale better than something like Lemmy which is written in rust
But sure, you can act like you know more than the Nextcloud devs
Okay - How then?
I’m a web developer too - so I feel rather qualified to speak on the subject. I don’t think the Nextcloud developers are some sort of genius team of engineers but I’m not saying they’re stupid or anything - just that PHP does not scale better than “practically every other technology out there”.
It forks or creates a thread per request. It’s horizontal scaling which is pretty common with any webapp. I don’t know why they claim PHP is special here. It’s a very common way to handle requests and you can do that with lots of languages and frameworks. More CPUs = more threads = more scaling. Throw more servers into the mix and you’re now “infinitely scaling” right? Well… No. Because I/O.
Webapps tend to be I/O bound rather than CPU bound. So asynchronous I/O leads to much better performance generally with fewer resources. Because no matter how many threads and servers you put in the app tier you’re going to be limited by the disks on your database at some point.
Exactly. The model PHP uses is explicitly worse than pretty much anything else. OpenCloud is a fork of ownCloud OCIS, which is written in Go, which scales better than most things since it uses cheap forms of concurrency, way cheaper than threads at scale. Go doesn’t use asyncio directly, it kind of fakes it with goroutines, which are incredibly cheap “threads” and the runtime abstracts away the blocking IO.
Pretty much everything here seems to be wrong:
I haven’t benchmarked it, but OCIS feels way faster than Nextcloud.
There’s a bunch of technical debt passed off as features, too. Like, Nextcloud runs background tasks as a cron job which is something I’ve never seen with other hosted services. It’s probably a holdover from before containerised applications were ubiquitous but honestly it comes off as jank.
Also, I wonder if there would be an argument for a Nextcloud fork that doubled down on PHP by utilising something like Laravel to put all the rendering on the server side. Right now it uses VueJS which is fine, but PHP is really best suited for server side rendering that you just can’t leverage when using a front end framework in JavaScript.
Drupal also uses crons to run repeated tasks. By default, Drupal cron cleans out stale database records for a few tables and breaks old caches. It can be extended by the developer, though.
PHP is pre-container and pre-virtualization, so I guess you can think of it as a hack way of getting garbage collection. To be honest, the cron’s translate pretty well to k8s cronjobs. You just use the same image as the app and override the command with the cronjob command.
Shame Opencloud only officially supports docker. Thats a no go for me.
Why?
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But it doesn’t, they have instructions for bare metal installs as well. Or you could use podman if you want.
Docker is way more simple to setup and run. You can use a docker-compose file instead of trying to install something locally by hand.
Hobby applications trying to scale to business relevance never gets old. “Self-hosted cloud” go fuck yourself
Nextcloud is more featureful (more apps like notes and hardware 2fa support). That is currently holding me to NC.
OpenCloud (fork of OCIS not original OC) is very similar when it comes to core functionality, but is missing those few apps I do not want to let go of.
Also note that nextcloud stores files in a very natural manner, where your file names and directories are stored the exact same on disk as on the interface. Opencloud does not do that. This is particularly handy if one day the app just explodes and refuses to run. With NC, you can just copy the files off the disk. Not so easy with OC.
Yes OCIS (owncloud infinity scale, a complete rewrite of the owncloud project) has a convoluted file structure and I guess OpenCloud has the same way of storing files.
This is the main drawback I see as well, but it isn’t a deal breaker for me. The way they handle the files allows OCIS and friends to work without a DB, in a stateless way I guess? This means that the entire setup is fully deterministically defined from a single file. This makes rollback very easy. So my rationale is that the files remain accessible even if a particular version decides to implode.
You can enable the POSIX driver on OCIS and get a more traditional filesystem layout. It still retains the “everything is in the filesystem” model as well.
Thanks for pointing that out!
owncloud.dev/ocis/storage/storagedrivers/
What are the apps that you would miss? I basically only use my NC as a Google drive and docs replacement, so all it has to do is store docx files and let me edit them on desktop or mobile without being glitchy and I’ve really wanted to consider OCIS or similar.
That second requirement for me seems hard because of how complex office suites are, but NC is driving me to my wit’s end with how slow and error prone it is, and how glitchy the NC office UI is (like glitches when selecting text or randomly scrolling you to the beginning).
Ocis/OpenCloud can integrate with Collabora, OnlyOffice but don’t currently have things like CalDAV, CardDAV, E2EE, Forms, Kanban boards, or other extensible features installable as plugins in Nextcloud.
If you desire a snappy and responsive cloud storage experience and don’t particularly need those things integrated into your cloud storage service, then Ocis or OpenCloud might be something to look into.
Ah I see, I guess at least that would help with the main UI, but I’m already using collabora through the collabora code server in next cloud so it sounds like I’ll probably have the same document editing experience with OCIS/opencloud. I used to use onlyoffice but after I tried out their mobile app, it started blocking me from editing documents using the next cloud app (which seemed to use the only office web UI) so I was forced to switch unless I started paying for onlyoffice.
While I do not make heavy use of these two, I like having my contacts and calendar synced and accessible on both my PCs and phone.
I actually use the notes app, and have a yubikey. For notes, I could just use the regular markdown editor, but I like way the app lays everything out. For the yubikey, NC by default uses yubikeys for passwordless login. I use an app which uses them for 2FA instead. I also use apps which allow me to view hashes and metadata from the files tab.
All that makes me not want to switch yet. We’ll get there eventually since none of the features I want are ultra complex or super uncommon.
OCIS, last I tested it (a while ago), also lacked the ability to right click files, requiring you to select it with the checkbox and then select the operation at the top of the screen. I sure hope that they’ve added that feature by now.
Gotcha thanks for the info! It looks like I would be fine with ocis or opencloud, but since my main use case and pain points are with document editing which is collabora, it probably wouldn’t change much besides simplifying the docker setup (I had to make a gross pile of nginx config stuff pieced together from many forum help posts to get the nextcloud fpm container to work smoothly). But it already works so unless it breaks there’s little incentive for me to change.
You can enable the POSIX driver on OCIS and get a more traditional filesystem layout.
I actually did not know this. Thank you! That was one of my more major gripes.
Looks like it’s the new default in OpenCloud.
It is unclear to me what the license of OpenCloud is. Are they open source? They reference a “trial license” on their site.
Server is Apache 2.0, and frontend is AGPL v3, which seems to be the same for ownCloud OCIS, which they seem to have forked from.
Looks okay to me. Not sure how important the last two are to be honest, but I included them for completeness
github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud/blob/…/LICENSE
github.com/opencloud-eu/web/blob/main/LICENSE
github.com/opencloud-eu/web-extensions/…/LICENSE
github.com/opencloud-eu/desktop/blob/…/COPYING
github.com/opencloud-eu/reva/blob/main/LICENSE
github.com/opencloud-eu/rclone/blob/…/COPYING
The marketing statements on the website say the right things too, but they are secondary to the above, obviously:
It would be nice if they had a page where they laid out all the components, what the licenses are, and how things fit together. Maybe that’s somewhere in the documentation pages they have, but I didn’t see it after a quick glance. Everything looks fine, and I guess the split happened a few months ago, so maybe they’re still scrambling to get everything set up.
Anyway, it looks like a cool project, and I’ll certainly be watching it, if not switching from OCIS (had set up for testing recently).
.
This is what you’re really looking for:
github.com/owncloud/ocis
Full rewrite in Go. Lots of features. Much better performance. More stable than nextcloud.
OoenCloud is a fork of this.
From the website, i can’t see how it’d different than owncloud.
There isn’t any difference. The team who was developing OCIS left own cloud and forked OCIS into OpenCloud. They’ll continue developing OpenCloud.
Here’s an article backing that statement up.
NextCloud is straight up unusable to me no matter how much resources I was throwing at it.
OpenCloud seems promising. I would definitely like to play with it a little. I would also like to check check how can I help with a thing or two there.
This seems like a similar story with matrix Synapse vs Dendrite.
Sounds like you don’t have Redis caching properly configured.
That said, OCIS is a lot faster, and OpenCloud being forked from OCIS should do the same.
i keep having issues and bugs on nextcloud. maybe i should try opencloud
NextCloud being so slow forced me to migrate to Seafile.
Seafile being less one-stop-shoppy made me not use it so much, but whenever I do it is always fast and responsive (unlike nextcloud, where 80% of the time I was looking at the loading indicator). Looking it up now though, it looks like it has a lot of new features I haven’t yet tried so I’m probably gonna start using it more now.
Only downside with Seafile is it’s deduplication (for me), because it stops me from easily accessing files directly (always gotta use a client). Likely a benefit for most though and I do rarely need to access a file directly on disk, just when I do, it’d be an easy shortcut for whatever I’m doing.
Check out the POSIX driver in OCIS/OpenCloud. It should keep the responsiveness of Seafile, while having a sane disk format.
Or you can try out the Seafile FUSE layer.
I’m in a similar boat, and I’ve been testing out Seafile and ownCloud OCIS, and I think I prefer OCIS. I’ll probably switch to OpenCloud though, since it seems a lot of the OCIS devs went there due to issues w/ management.
Some things I didn’t like about Seafile:
But hey, if it works, it works, so don’t mess w/ it.
Thanks for your reply, I will definitely keep that in mind if Seafile fails to meet any critera moving on, but yeah your last point is also right, it would probably be a big pain to migrate out at this point with all my data for multiple users here.
It seems a lot has been modernising recently, I didn’t know they were also using Go, but hopefully they continue with it for new code.
Why use OpenCloud instead of ownCloud Infinite Scale, which it was forked from? What’s the value proposition?
Supposedly the team left OwnCloud and forked it. So the value is that the OCIS team will be working on OpenCloud in the future.
Wow. Here’s an article that discusses it:
While I dont see OpenCloud replacing Nextcloud anytime soon, I always welcome new projects, especially like this to the open source community!
I’m not the biggest fan of Nextcloud but there currently isn’t a lot of good alternatives that have the same features and polish.
The issue with Nextcloud is the PHP junk it comes with. Writing something in Go is much better and it is silly to me that Nextcloud puts code in docker volumes. If they could separate out the code and data they would be in a much better position.
So serious question: what,.in your mind, is junk about PHP?
It is not really a proper language. It is designed to run to generate HTML dynamically but uses outside of that are pushing it. It is also problematic that Nextcloud mixes code and data. It is also slower than compiled languages like C, Go or Rust.
I think Go is really good for web applications with lots of server back end code since it is fast and static while being memory safe and easy to read. The Go syntax is cleaner than PHP and less hard to maintain.
I have a bunch of other reasons elsewhere in this thread, but I just wanted to back you up here. Go is a lot easier to deal with than PHP in many ways, and it has a lot of tools to track down issues, while also have a lot better performance. And I don’t even like Go that much (used it for the better part of a decade, pretty much since 1.0), and I much prefer Rust. But Go is 100% a good option for this use-case, since it’s mostly short-lived requests with relatively simple logic, so the various footguns I dislike about Go aren’t particularly relevant (and are way nicer than the footguns in PHP).
PHP feels like it “evolved” with hacks on top of hacks, and it’s sort of being cleaned up now. Go feels like it was “designed,” with conscious choices being made from the outset, so everything feels a lot more consistent. That makes it easier to spot bogs, performance issues, etc. Go is just the better option here, and it’s not close.
Why, oh true Scotsman?
Probably, but it requires a whole lot less work to get something done. One developer pays for 20 big ass servers, so if I have to spin up one or two extra servers over requiring way less developers, that is a no-brainer
Go kinda looks/feels like JavaScript to me whereas PHP feels more like C. I find modern PHP syntax to be cleaner than go, but that is a personal opinion. Either way, maintainability has more to do with your developers and coding guidelines than with the language itself.
So really your only reason for possibly not liking next cloud is that it’s PHP, correct?
What is the problem with PHP? I keep asking it and until now every response has been near me worthy. “Don’t like PHP because some function calls are not consistent.”, “don’t like PHP because 20 years ago it had Manu unsafe practices!”, that sort of nonsense.
What is the problem with PHP, for you?
I’m not OP, but here are my reasons:
There are a bunch of other reasons I strongly dislike PHP, but hopefully this is enough to show why I generally prefer to avoid it. In fact, Nextcloud is my only PHP-based app, and I’m testing out OCIS now (will probably try OpenCloud soon).
PHP doesn’t have a built in web server because it doesn’t need one, makes development a whole lot easier as each page is it’s independent process. No worries about memory loss, state corruption, or other issues. IMHO it adds to its security and ease of handling
It’s super fast and easy to setup and get going
Web sockets work just fine, I use them daily on dozens of servers doing hundreds of requests / sec all day every day
They did an audit and found issues? Great, I applaud people searching and finding issues. Shall we do the same for Rust, go, or chuckle JavaScript?
You’re unfamiliar.with the language. <<< Yeah, that is the standard reason for hating PHP, it’s not <insert my personal favorite language>
PHP… security?
Any security you get from running as a separate process/thread is undermined by sloppy language semantics and standard library. The built-in “mysql_” library was atrocious and stayed in the standard library for years (removed in 7.0, ~10 years after the previous release). Errors at least used to be really inconsistently communicated (sometimes need to call another function to check error status, sometimes returns 0 or - 1, sometimes raises exceptions). Types are pretty loose and subtly change type (e.g. when an int overflows, it becomes a float?). Variables spring into existence when you use them, so no warning about typos, shadowing, etc.
The language wasn’t really designed, it evolved from a simple templating engine to a full fledged language, and it cleaned up a little along the way. But a lot of the old cruft still remains.
Yeah, that was always the goal. All you need is a webserver and a directory of scripts and you’re golden.
But lowering the barrier to entry comes with costs. It encourages people to just copy and paste crap until it works, I know because that’s exactly what I did when I first used PHP (JS w/ jQuery is the same way). This encourages a “just get it working” mindset instead of actually understanding what’s going on.
You can certainly write good PHP code, my point is that it actively encourages cludgy code, which means security holes, and the best example is the language and standard library themselves.
Do they? I assume they hog a whole process/thread for themselves instead of being efficiently managed in something with proper async tooling, so it sounds like it would scale horribly. What happens if you have a million open websockets?
Yes. I would be very surprised if Go or Rust yield even a fraction of the vulnerabilities as PHP. Even if we expand the scope a bit to a full-fledged web server framework. And that’s with all the server bits, while PHP only worries about its standard library.
I’ve used each of those languages. I’ve built sites in PHP, Go, and Rust, as well as Python and JavaScript (nodejs). PHP is by far the jankiest, and that’s including all the footguns w/ Go’s concurrency model.
@sugar_in_your_tea @phoenixz Hi there! If you wouldn't mind indulging grampa for a minute - I'm a former php4 maintainer for Debian with a story.
One time we found a bug that caused the php interpreter to crash, based on the input passed to a function. We decided it was a security issue, but even that was kind of besides the point. We reported it upstream to the php folks. They (Rasmus!) told us it was not a high priority issue, because apache would simply restart when it crashes - no big deal
🤦♂️
Oh man, that’s exactly the cultural thing I’m talking about. Thanks!
PHP apps always feel old.
So does your comment, what’s your point? Are you really trying to tell me that an app developed in PHP 15 years ago still feels old? Because doh.
Next cloud feels old to you?
Nextcloud really does feel old.
Care to elaborate?
Like seriously, with the PHP extension gone from the URL you wouldn’t know it’s PHP but somehow it’s old because…?
I don’t have any credible feedback for you.
I dislike php. That’s my feeling. The vibe.
When I’m browsing self hostable things I avoid php unless it’s really the only option.
My completely unsupported “feeling” is that apps written in php are awkward and clunky and just less pleasant to host.
I’m sorry if that offends you, and I don’t care at all what you think of my opinion.
I only mentioned “php apps feel old” because I could see you were some kind of php devotee and that it would trigger you. Maybe look into that.
Tried OCIS a while back and its way faster than NC syncing files, even the initial sync was so fast I didn’t trust it was fully done (but it was).
That being said, OCIS is missing several key features I daily use: namely proper DAV support (contacts, calendar, todo, journal, etc) as well as integrations for stuff like SeedVault for mobile backups.
I only use nextdoor for the file storage. Like Dropbox type of thing. Too get files to different computers when I need them. I don’t use any other feature.
Should I switch to opencloud?
Have you tried Synching? If you only need transferring files back and forth and no version control or snapshot-like backups, that might be even simpler
Syncthing also even has basic version control, just no “web file browsing” interface.
I do want the browser interface image I can’t sweep syncthing, like on a work computer, public computer, fault friends whatever.
I think that was my 1 hang up for syncthing.
That’s basically my use-case as well, and it’s why I’m currently switching to OCIS/OpenCloud. And OCIS (and probably OpenCloud) recently introduced the POSIX driver, so the main complaint about files not being accessible w/o some extra tool is no longer an issue. I’m planning to hard-link the data directories elsewhere to make interacting with it a bit easier.
Evaluation of the product no longer required.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/acf1d930-e52c-4120-a70e-5414d11f298f.jpeg">
Deployment of NC on kubernetes/docker (and maintenance thereof) is super scary. They copy config files around in dockerfile, e.g., it’s a hell of a mess. (And not just docker: I have one instance running on an old-fashioned webhosting with only ftp access and I have to manually edit .ini and apache config after each update since they’re being overwritten.) As the documentation of OCIS is growing and it gets more features, I might actually change even the larger instances, but for now I must consider it as not feature complete (since people have expectations from nextcloud that aren’t met by ocis and its extensions). Moreover, I have more trust in the long term openness of nextcloud as opposed to owncloud, for historical reasons.
Question for the OP or anyone who uses OpenCloud: How does it size up in an enterprise? NextCloud has known capacity for corporate use with SSO, a desktop app, integrations…but it has all the pitfalls of PHP (granted I run it with Nginx/FastCGI and a lot of resources). The thing is, anything not PHP can be run for less overhead in terms of actual cloud costs, so I see a benefit to OpenCloud. But the features have to be there. I know a desktop app is coming soon, and thats just one of many needs.
+1 that question, I’ve also never installed/used OpenCloud, simply because I didn’t see the benefit of it until now.
Based on the comments given so far, I have some hope that over time, the Go-approach could give us a more resource saving, but feature full alternative to tangle with, so I will stay tuned :)
For now I will stick to Nextcloud, because it gives me all the features I need and the maintanance, at least for the couple-hundred-user-instances I maintain, is not that bad, as I often read around the web :) But I also can understand, that people wish to have less maintenance struggles and therefor try sth else, wich is good for me, so I can hope for more experience reports in the near future :p