Nextcloud Talk Scaling in the enterprise setup
High-Performance Back-end (HPB)
Nextcloud Talk is ideal for audio/video meetings and chat. Talk can be used in the browser, with Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Iridium, Opera and other browsers. For smartphones and tablets Nextcloud Talk is available for free as an iOS and Android app.
By default Nextcloud Talk uses a PHP-based server. Talk can therefore be installed very easily and used without major installation and configuration effort. With the standard Nextcloud Talk the connections of the participants are Peer-2-Peer. For audio and video, no central server is needed to distribute the streams. The advantage of not requiring a central server often limits the maximum number of participants in meetings and conferences to 3 to 5 participants per meeting. With sufficient network bandwidth and processing speed for the participants, P2P (Peer-to-Peer) also allows more participants (up to a maximum of 20 participants). Usually the situation of high network speed and stability of the network connection is rarely given in practice, e.g. in intranets in connection with powerful desktop computers.
Scale Nextcloud Talk: webinars, school classes
For more participants in meetings, there is the High Performance Back-End (HPB) offered by Struktur. It includes a Signaling Server and a Selective Forward Unit (SFU) that solves this bottleneck by receiving a stream from each user and forwarding it on demand. This allows a single call to scale to about 30-50 active participants in hundreds of concurrent meetings. Webinars and other large-scale broadcasts with hundreds or thousands of participants are possible. The high performance back-end setup contains special functions for this.
High-Performance Backend
The HPB also reduces the load of calls on the next cloud server, takes care of "signaling" and optionally allows the connection of SIP gates, so that users can dial into calls via telephone.
Nextcloud Talk Service
For the operation of Nextcloud Talk with a larger number of participants, Struktur AG offers a high performance back-end service that optimally meets individual capacity requirements. Alternatively, the HPB can be operated on site, just like Nextcloud itself. The customer should be aware that the operation has a significant need for dedicated bandwidth and CPU requirements.
The required software is available as open source software for the operation of an own server as well as a maintained service with optimal Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Software Architecture
The Nextcloud Talk high-performance back-end consists of several open source software components: the Spreed Signaling Server, the open source messaging system NATS, the WebRTC server Janus and the web front-ends nginx and Apache.
Secure and private
The calls are encrypted end-to-end, so that the communication cannot be intercepted. Individual and group calls are 100% end-to-end encrypted without the high-performance backend. When the HPB is used, all calls are routed encrypted through it. Chat logs are securely stored on your own server. The confidentiality of the communication and its metadata is guaranteed by the self-hosting Nextcloud Talk!
Spreed Signaling Server
The source code (AGPL) and documentation of the Spreed Signaling Server are available on github.
https://github.com/strukturag/nextcloud-spreed-signaling
Enterprise Ready
Nextcloud Talk High-Performance back end by Struktur provides the capacity, reliability and functionality that enterprises and organisations require to conduct their business privately, securely and efficiently.
The Nextcloud Talk back-end improves connection speed and reliability, reduces server load and the strain on desktop computers, and allows more people to be in one call by improving network efficiency.