My random thoughts about politics, society and technology (tag: owncloud)

History and Future of Cloud Federation

I’m now working for about two years on something called Federated Cloud Sharing. It started on June, 23er 2014 with the release of ownCloud 7.0. Back then it was simply called “Server to Server sharing”. During all this years I never wrote about the broader ideas behind this technology, why we do it, what we achieved and where we are going.

Motivation

The Internet started as a decentralized network, meant to be resilient to disruptions, both due to accidents or malicious activity. This was one of the key factors which made the Internet successful. From the World Wide Web, over IRC, news groups, e-mail to XMPP. Everything was designed as decentralized networks, which is why if you are on the Google servers you can email people at Yahoo. Everybody can set up his own web server, e-mail or chat server and communicate with everyone else. Individuals up to large organisations could easily join the network, participate and build business without barriers. People could experiment with new innovative ideas and nobody had the power to stop them or to slow them down. This was only possible because all underlying technology and protocols were build on both Open Standards and Free Software.

Road Ahead

I just realized that at June, 1 it is exactly four years since I joined ownCloud Inc. That’s a perfect opportunity to look back and to tell you about some upcoming changes. I will never forget how all this get started. It was FOSDEM 2012 when I met Frank, we already knew each other from various Free Software activities. I told him that I was looking for new job opportunities and he told me about ownCloud Inc. The new company around the ownCloud initiative which he just started together with the help of others. I was directly sold to the idea of ownCloud and a few months later I was employee number six at ownCloud Inc.

Federated Sharing – What’s new in ownCloud 9.0

Privacy, control and freedom was always one of the main reasons to run your own cloud instead of storing your data on a proprietary and centralized service. Only if you run your own cloud service you know exactly where your data is stored and who can access it. You are in control of your data. But this also introduces a new challenge. If everyone runs his own cloud service it become inevitable harder to share pictures with your friends or to work together on a document. That’s the reason why we at ownCloud are working at a feature called Federated Cloud Sharing. The aim of Federated Cloud Sharing is to close this gap by allowing people to connect their clouds and easily share data across different ownCloud installations. For the user it should make no difference whether the recipient is on the same server or not.

The ownCloud Public Link Creator

ownCloud Share Link Creator – Context Menu

Holiday season is the perfect time to work on some stuff on your personal ToDo list. ownCloud 6 introduced a public REST-style Share-API which allows you to call various share operations from external applications. Since I started working on the Share-API I thought about having a simple shell script on my file manager to automatically upload a file and generate a public link for it… Here it is!

Introduction to the new ownCloud Encryption App

Last weekend we released a first preview version of the new encryption app. This wouldn’t be possible without the work done by Sam Tuke and Florin Peter. Thanks a lot for all your work! Let me take the opportunity to tell you some details about the app, what it does and how it works.

The encryption app for ownCloud 5 was a complete re-write. We moved from the relatively weak blowfish algorithm to the more secure AES algorithm. The complete encryption is built on top of OpenSSL a well-known and tested encryption library. Further, the encryption app is integrated into ownCloud seamlessly. This means that the encrypt and decrypt happens transparently so that you can still use all the other features from ownCloud like sharing, different viewer apps, WebDAV access etc.