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 :)
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.