Three solutions for nextcloud hosting
Attentive visitors to our website have probably already noticed that we have several Nextcloud offerings. We offer Nextcloud in Business & Professional and Enterprise & Enterprise self-hosted variants. Why are there three different offers for one and the same solution?? After all, it's always about Nextcloud cloud storage. The reason is the underlying infrastructure and the different target groups of our offers.
Nextcloud Business & Professional
Nextcloud Business and Professional are our offerings for companies and organizations that have up to a hundred users on their Nextcloud. The following objectives were the focus of the development of this offer:
✔ A way to quickly provide customers with their Nextcloud.
✔ Securely delineate the customer's data from the data of other Nextcloud customers.
✔ An effective resource utilization.
In the beginning, we considered whether one Nextcloud server per customer or many customers on one Nextcloud server is the solution. But in the end, both solutions had shortcomings. Against a Nextcloud server per customer spoke our requirements of rapid deployment and effective resource utilization. Against many customers on a Nextcloud server spoke our requirement for demarcation and funnily enough also the effective resource utilization. While a Nextcloud server per customer is often like "shooting cannons at sparrows," a Nextcloud server for all customers would quickly be comparable to putting too much butter on a slice of bread. In addition, the customer has to forego many advantages, such as customization to his company design or the (almost) unlimited use of the Nextcloud app store.
Nextcloud in our managed Kubernetes environment
In the end we found our solution in containerization. To that end, we've built multiple Docker containers from a Nextcloud server that can be started and discarded in seconds. So that this abundance of containers does not become confusing we need of course an orchestration solution. Since we have such an orchestration on offer with managed Kubernetes, this was of course quickly found.
By using managed Kubernetes, we can quickly respond to changing resource requirements of individual Nextcloud pods and have a powerful tool for management and maintenance.
Nextcloud-Enterprise – selfhosted
Nextcloud is the market leader in selfhosted cloaboration servers. Self-hosted means that the software is hosted on its own server / vServer. This can be, for example, a vServer in our IaaS cloud or a server in your own data center. However, self-hosted does not mean that you want to install and manage the software yourself. Therefore, we are happy to support many companies with our experience and the possibility to get Nextcloud developer support through us as well.
In such scenarios, we usually do not use a Kubernetes environment but a classic Linux vServer. Despite all the "dockers", a server still has its place today. We usually recommend Nextcloud server for companies that want to use their Nextcloud with 25-150 users. For these, we set up Nextcloud on its own server, which we then manage and continuously monitor.
Of course, our support is also available for user questions. Since Nextcloud server also allows user authentication against your own Active Directory (LDAP), this is also very popular as an installation in-house. Of course, we are also happy to support such servers. Of course, for companies with many locations, the option of running a separate Nextcloud at each location and using it like a Nextcloud server through federation is exciting.
Also, the beauty of having your own Nextcloud server is that you don't have to worry about the future. Experience shows that operating system upgrades work without problems, and also the exchange of the underlying hardware is no problem with solutions such as VMware or OpenStack. By the way, a bit of Docker is included with Nextcloud servers as well. If the user wants to use apps like Open-Office or the full-text search, we install them as Docker containers on their own Nextcloud server.