EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud • Hacker News Board

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#31

Post by derefr » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 11:43 PM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

The recent changes to Dropbox incited me to finally build a home NAS/personal-cloud server based on Nextcloud last month. My first impressions were a bit negative, as I was expecting "open source Dropbox" and nothing more; Nextcloud actually does quite a lot, which made me think it was bloatware. This is due to my ignorance and jumping in too fast. What Nextcloud actually is: a personal Dropbox-style server, with ope…

More obvious comparisons to Nextcloud are Synology's DiskStation Manager (the OS that runs on any Synology NAS device), and Apple's Server.app. Both aim to provide the same sort of "SME Intranet Services in-a-box" experience. (Just, neither are FOSS; both are platform-locked.)

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#32

Post by wil421 » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

compuguy wrote: post #23

wil421 wrote: post #3

Do EU governments not have something like FedRamp? I work on a popular SaaS product for enterprises. At my last job I supported a managed service provider who was going after some federal IT outsourcing business. AWS has FedRamp instances in DCs no one else uses. Same with the SaaS system I work on. They had all kinds of restrictions including only allowing US Citizens to access the systems.

You're referring to AWS's GovCloud regions, right ( https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ )? I also believe Microsoft has a eqivalent product ( https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/gove... )

Yes, FedRamp is the certification. GovCloud is FedRamp certified AWS.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#33

Post by m463 » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 11:48 PM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

The recent changes to Dropbox incited me to finally build a home NAS/personal-cloud server based on Nextcloud last month. My first impressions were a bit negative, as I was expecting "open source Dropbox" and nothing more; Nextcloud actually does quite a lot, which made me think it was bloatware. This is due to my ignorance and jumping in too fast. What Nextcloud actually is: a personal Dropbox-style server, with ope…

I tried setting up owncloud/nextcloud a few times and always had trouble. I did try nextcloudpi (but I can't recall the problems I had)

Eventually I did get it going with Ubos on a raspberry pi 3 booting from a fast sandisk cz80 usb flash drive. Ubos under the covers is based on arch linux.

It was pretty straightforward to set up.

I then installed nextcloud apps for iOS and Mac OS.

It is nice -- it does files, contacts, calendars, photos, etc.

Then I didn't touch anything. It works, although I'm at least a year out of date, but everything is stable and all my stuff syncs back and forth.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#34

Post by novaRom » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 11:51 PM UTC

I first thought it's about a new competitor for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. A bit misleading headline. According to Wikipedia: Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. More properly would be to say: cloud storage.

It's very bad Europe has no its own public cloud yet. All universities, schools, research centers, public services can be much more efficient and secure than now. But they will probably fall again into the same trap like it happened with Windows and other proprietary garbage before. Will it be AWS or Azure this time?

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#35

Post by choward » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 11:53 PM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

The recent changes to Dropbox incited me to finally build a home NAS/personal-cloud server based on Nextcloud last month. My first impressions were a bit negative, as I was expecting "open source Dropbox" and nothing more; Nextcloud actually does quite a lot, which made me think it was bloatware. This is due to my ignorance and jumping in too fast. What Nextcloud actually is: a personal Dropbox-style server, with ope…

> At this point, my only criticisms are that I think the installation should be more idiot-friendly, and the UI smells of 2012.

I agree about the installation but what's a good solution? If you're self-hosting something (at home) there are two main problems you need to solve. You need to be able to access it from the internet and you need a backup strategy. I would argue that an install isn't complete unless you have those and they aren't easy to automate.

As for the UI, I agree. It's pretty blah. But I would take that over pretty much all of the recent garbage UIs that are more catered to making money instead of improving the UX.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#36

Post by Eric_WVGG » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 12:10 AM UTC

choward wrote: post #35

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

The recent changes to Dropbox incited me to finally build a home NAS/personal-cloud server based on Nextcloud last month. My first impressions were a bit negative, as I was expecting "open source Dropbox" and nothing more; Nextcloud actually does quite a lot, which made me think it was bloatware. This is due to my ignorance and jumping in too fast. What Nextcloud actually is: a personal Dropbox-style server, with ope…

> At this point, my only criticisms are that I think the installation should be more idiot-friendly, and the UI smells of 2012. I agree about the installation but what's a good solution? If you're self-hosting something (at home) there are two main problems you need to solve. You need to be able to access it from the internet and you need a backup strategy. I would argue that an install isn't complete unless you have…

I guess the fact that 80% of the installation is as good as it is makes me frustrated about the last 20%.

One example: the install expects that the data drive will be on a 1-2gb USB attached storage drive; the Odroid uses SATA, 6tb drives are very commonplace, and the process for formatting 4gb is apparently completely different in Linux?

To reiterate, the installer is really good, but someone stopped just short of making it great.

Regarding the UI, it's not terrible, but I hope that Nextcloud Corp invests some of their newly found riches on a top-class UX designer.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#37

Post by jeena » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 12:34 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #29

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

The recent changes to Dropbox incited me to finally build a home NAS/personal-cloud server based on Nextcloud last month. My first impressions were a bit negative, as I was expecting "open source Dropbox" and nothing more; Nextcloud actually does quite a lot, which made me think it was bloatware. This is due to my ignorance and jumping in too fast. What Nextcloud actually is: a personal Dropbox-style server, with ope…

To give the opposite view, my experience with Nextcloud was a disaster. The setup was painful, the UI would randomly not respond to my requests, and in general it just felt like a bad PHP hobby project. Then to top it off their sync client basically deleted half of my photo collection for some reason, and nobody seemed to have any idea why, in general adopting a ‘that sometimes happens, just reset the sync client’ st…

Sadly this happened to me to, I synced the deletion of my complete music library to all the devices. Lucky my that I had the CDs and download codes from the vinyls, but it was quite some work to get it back.

Since then I use NextCloud for calendar and addressbook sync, notes sync and a browser mail frontend if I'm not on any of my own computers.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#38

Post by codedokode » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 12:54 AM UTC

nominated1 wrote: post #19

Do EU Governments care about security? Has a proper audit of this monstrosity been done? Or is this just another ploy to get better pricing?

Where is information stored securely? On a private server not accessible from outside and protected by law or on foreign publicly accessible servers not protected by local laws?

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#39

Post by shreyshrey » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 1:10 AM UTC

We(FileCloud) compete with NextCloud in Self-Hosted EFSS space and part of Gartner MQ. We are seeing more and more government customers are asking for solutions that offer complete control over their data. We have large government and education customers in switzerland and Denmark.

Re: EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud

#40

Post by olliej » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 5:40 AM UTC

Alternatively "Countries that aren't the US choose not to work with US companies or subsidiaries because the US gov. has stated that foreign subsidiaries are still beholden to US law over the local law, and the US constitution does not apply to foreigners".

It's not just "independence" it's literally: you cannot trust a US [owned] company because the US government has said it that US law governs any foreign subsidiaries. Because they're now magically subject to US law they have to comply with the patriot act, which is already unconstitutional. But that doesn't matter as the US Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the constitution does not apply to foreigners. Therefore they don't even need the patriot act: foreigners don't get the 4th amendment.

If you were the leader of some country, and there was another country acting that way, would you ever want to store any of your information, or rely on services provided by, a company subject to such rules?