In a quiet little room, ownCloud has been working on the new version of its software for over a year and is now showing its new Infinite Scale project for the first time – but the developers are not slow, they have big plans. Up to and including ownCloud X, the software is a classic LAMP application: MySQL works in the background, Apache serves PHP pages and the entire construct usually runs on a Linux installation.

Over the years, however, the ownCloud developers have come up against more and more performance and scalability limits, the cause of which is mostly due to corresponding limitations in PHP. Anyone who operates large ownCloud installations knows this: the more users and files the instance manages, the more sluggish it becomes over time. Admins are also regularly confronted with a lack of storage space, because up to now ownCloud has saved its users’ files locally on a normal file system. If there is little space there, the problem is not that easy to circumvent.

Goodbye, PHP Everyone The developers in ownCloud Infinite Scale are planning to cut off these old braids for good. This is more of a revolution than evolution: the developers almost completely trash your old code and replace it with a complete rewrite in Go. oCIS follows a model of three layers: The lowest layer takes care of the storage of files, the middle layer includes all core services and the third layer is the completely rewritten web interface.

A first test of the new ownCloud Infinite Scale and the also new web interface, written in Vue.js.

The core of ownCloud will in future consist of various microservices that send commands and instructions to each other via gRPC. The developers bundle the MESH software Traefik firmly with oCIS in order not to have to worry about issues such as load balancing and secure communication within the service network. Conversely, this means: If the running instances of a certain ownCloud service are no longer sufficient, additional instances of the same service can be started ad hoc.

Architecturally, oCIS uses various advantages of Go for acceleration. If the user requests a special action via API or web interface in the future, the individual oCIS microservices will take care of it in the background. The user does not have to wait until the respective action has been carried out successfully before he can send the next command. The effect is also found on the code level, where Go, unlike PHP, masters real concurrency and can therefore perform several operations at the same time.

On top of that, the switch to microservices reduces the administrative effort from ownCloud. The software will no longer need an external database such as MySQL in future – its own microservices will take care of its data storage.