Nextcloud Experiences

You probably wouldn't read it for the first time when I say that the best way to learn things is by doing them yourself. In our search for a chat solution, we took a look at Nextcloud Talk and host it ourselves.

Nextcloud sparked our interest for a couple of reasons:

• It’s open source. No ‘behind the curtain’ surprises.
• A European company is behind it. EU First!
• It’s hosted on premise. No data is sent to the cloud.
• You can host it yourself.

All in all it’s a great product to experiment self-hosting with. While doing this, we learn a lot about the product, self-hosting and have a proper chat solution at our disposal.

The Setup

As I’m already running a nice Kubernetes cluster, I decided to run Nextcloud on it. I used a bit more manual setup for my own learnings, but you can use the Nextcloud Helm Chart.

The Experience

The experience of setting up Nextcloud Talk up until now is mainly positive. Most of the time, it just works and video calls are of good quality. We did encounter a few issues, including a desktop client that freezes up and a video call that dropped a connection. But for now we are happy with the product and will keep experimenting with it.

Resource consumption

Nextcloud is running happily alongside a bunch of other applications on my Kubernetes cluster. It uses roughly 1 GB of memory. CPU usage is neglegible as far as I can tell for now. Bear in mind that this is a small setup with only a few users.