History and Previous Meet-ups
The Open Cloud Mesh initiative started in 2015 within the GÉANT Association. Here follows a brief history of the project, including pointers to all technical presentations held over the years, with their recordings where available.
Origins of the project at GÉANT
- In December 2013, the GÉANT Association (formerly known as TERENA) and ownCloud Inc. made an agreement that serves to facilitate the desire of various National Research and Education Networking organisations (NRENs) to introduce services based on ownCloud technology and/or to offer the technology to their constituencies. Such technology appeared to be the most promising in order to provide on-premise file-based sync&share.
- As part of this collaboration effort, in January 2015, Christian Schmitz from ownCloud initiated an idea to interconnect the individual on-premise private cloud domains at the server side in order to provide federated sharing and syncing functionality between the different administrative domains.
- The initiative was presented at the Cloud Sync&Share Storage (CS3) Workshop 2016 to an emerging community of vendors, NRENs and other institutions.
- Minutes of the early meetings and actions are available at the GÉANT wiki.
- Following that initial effort, implementations appeared in the market featuring a
1.0-proposal1 OCM API version, prior to official standardization. A Campfire-style discussion about current developments and standardization plans was held at CS3 2020.
The EU-funded CS3MESH4EOSC project
- In January 2020, a consortium of multiple NRENs and independent actors of the CS3 community, led by CERN, kick-started the CS3MESH4EOSC project.
- Technical Workshop held in June 2020: the
1.0.0 release of the OCM API was published. On the occasion, the OCM repository was migrated to the cs3org GitHub Organization. The standard was already implemented by ownCloud, Nextcloud and Seafile, and used in production to federate multiple instances.
- Automated tests initiated and hosted by PonderSource.
- OCM Workshop held at CS3 2021.
- OCM Interoperability Session held at the CS3 2022.
- Several OCM-related talks are given at CS3 2023.
- In May 2023, a revised version of the API was released, which included much of the development effort driven by the CS3MESH4EOSC project.
- In June 2023, members of the CS3MESH4EOSC project presented at the EGI 2023 conference, demonstrating the ScienceMesh and its OCM-based federation capabilities with live demos.
NL-net funded efforts
- In October 2023 a W3C Community Group was launched.
- A Campfire and Panel session about OCM took place at CS3 2024, held back at CERN on its 10th anniversary. Subsequently, the CS3 community initiated thematic SIGs, including an OCM SIG.
- The OCM Test Suite was revamped, and the specification underwent a major rewrite in order to improve clarity and adopt the IETF Internet-Draft format.
- Technical Workshop held in November 2024: a new version was published and the Internet-Draft document was presented.
- Presentation at FOSDEM 25.
- In March 2025, the team was invited to present the Internet-Draft document at the IETF Meeting #122. The presentation was postponed to the IETF Meeting #123, as it clashed with the CS3 2025 event.
- At CS3 2025 the OCM CS3 SIG held a session to report on its activity.