Good morning, everyone!
We’ve got a few more case studies, and user experiences to share with you. This one is all about Nextcloud from our own @Spencer-45D. Spencer is a Senior Storage Architect at 45Drives, and works at heavily architecting and configuring large-scale Ceph clusters. He has tons of experience with Nextcloud and wanted to share some information from his perspective.
Like always, if you have any questions or comments, leave them below to encourage further discussion.
Why I chose Nextcloud
by Spencer MacPhee
Nextcloud, as the name suggests, provides a cloud like experience akin to Google Drive or Dropbox. Instead of having to pay another provider for this cloud Nextcloud allows you to host it locally on your own hardware or VM.
45Drives has used Nextcloud for many years, both as a bare metal application and in a containerized stack. I’ve worked with it personally for a long time and am familiar with the inner workings of its stack.
As far as cloud platforms are concerned Nextcloud is certainly one of the fullest featured. Aside from just storage, Nextcloud can also provide other cloud-like services such as voice/video calling, email, calendar management, and a built-in office suite.
In terms of solving problems, or “real world” applications for me, accessing pictures, videos, and files remotely anywhere in the world is something that is important to me, and Nextcloud really helps with that.
I’ve used Nextcloud in my own homelab for years. Every time I go on a trip, I simply upload my photos there and can easily share them out to my friends and family.
For the most part, Nextcloud is generally easy to use; however, historically, it has been a bit complicated on the back-end. Administration can be challenging, but in the containerized setup we use with Nginx proxy manager, it is much easier to set up.
Something really cool about Nextcloud, in my opinion, is its integration with Collabora. That was a pleasant surprise. Nextcloud has always claimed that its office suite was near feature matching with a traditional Office 365 suite and I hadn’t really believed it until I ported over a few spreadsheets.