In May, we improved the website front page, added Collabora for editing documents and added Prometheus & grafana for monitoring. In June we will be at RightsCon, presenting OAS on Wednesday morning.

Collabora document editing

We decided to set up Collabora for editing the documents you save in your Nextcloud. We had to make a choice between OnlyOffice and Collabora here. We decided to follow the path of least resistance for now: Collabora already had a “helm chart” and was thus easier for us to set up. If we find out many users prefer OnlyOffice, we can still change to OnlyOffice in the future.

Part of this month was also spent on making sure the Nextcloud and Collabora installation never fails.

Monitoring

Prometheus is a monitoring application that can use several Kubernetes and application-specific hooks to show an administrator the status of your application cluster. This month, we installed Prometheus with Grafana – a dashboard that can show these data. Next month we will focus on configuring Prometheus and Grafana for the Kubernetes cluster and our applications.

Beta testing in September

We have set a goal for ourselves: to start beta testing in September. Alpha testing will already start this or next month.

The tests will focus on Nextcloud and Collabora, using Prometheus/Grafana for monitoring and debugging. Chat and web hosting applications will be added to OpenAppStack later.

During the beta testing period, the OpenAppStack team will keep a close eye on your OAS setup and try to resolve problems for you. Beta tests can either be done on infrastructure owned or rented by the tester, or on Greenhost or Eclips.is infrastructure. However, during the beta testing period, the OAS team will need access to the test machine for debugging and problem solving.

If you’re interested in beta testing, please contact us.

RightsCon

For those if you attending RightsCon, we have a talk about the open source applications used in OpenAppStack on Wednesday morning between 9:00 and 10:15 AM. If you’re there and interested please come take a look, or talk to us later in the week.

Traefik nginx

Last month we started removing Traefik in favour of nginx and cert-manager, because we ran into some serious limitations of the community edition. This month we finished this process.

Platform upgrades

Apart from the above, there were standard upgrade tasks:

  • Upgraded RKE
  • Upgraded Ansible & mitogen
  • Improved stability of Nextcloud & Collabora pods
  • Improved stability of TLS certificate tests
  • Small improvements