Open Source

Microsoft alternatives – migration to open source technologies

We are developing a migration strategy from Microsoft 365 to open source technologies for a large German research company. On the one hand, it’s a question of regaining cyber souvereignty and, on the other hand, of meeting increased security requirements. This is to be achieved by using free and open source software (FLOSS). Overall, the project is similar to the Microsoft Alternatives Project (MAlt) at CERN and the Project Phoenix of Dataport.

The principles of the project are:

The same service should be offered to all employees
Vendor lock-ins should be avoided in order to reduce the risk of dependency
Most of the data should be owned by the research company

Plans for 2020

For 2020 it is planned to evaluate alternative solutions for many services and to publish prototypes and pilot projects.

Product group	Service	Product to evaluate	Status
Identity and access management	LDAP	OpenLDAP	Production
Personal Information Management	eMail	Zimbra	Evaluation
	Calendar	Zimbra	Evaluation
	Contacts	Zimbra	Evaluation
Collaboration	File sharing	NextCloud	Production
	Office integration	NextCloud	Evaluation
	Direct mails/chat	Mattermost	Production
	Video conferences	Jitsi Meet	Production
Search	Search engine	Elasticsearch	Evaluation
	Frontend/ Visualisation	Kibana	Evaluation
	Authentication/ Access control	Open Distro Security	Evaluation
	k-nearest neighbors	Open Distro KNN	Evaluation
Project management	Issues/Milestones	GitLab	Evaluation
	Time tracking	gitlabtime	Evaluation
	Documentation	GitLab Wiki	Evaluation
Research software [1], [2]	Package manager	Spack	Produktion
	IDE	JupyterHub	Produktion
	Development environments	Jupyter Kernels	Production
	Software versioning	Git	Production
	Data versioning	DVC	Production
	Gathering and storing data	Intake	Pilot
	Spreadsheet	ipysheet	Production
	Geospatial data	PostGIS	Production
	Map creation	OpenStreetMap	Production
	DevOps	GitLab CI/CD Pipeline	Pilot
	Documentation	Sphinx	Production

Hosting strategy

There are essentially three different hosting variants within the research company:

Society-wide infrastructure: Infrastructure, which is used by most of the research projects and administrations across the institutes, is to be provided by the research company’s central IT.
Institute-wide infrastructure: Infrastructure that is required for the special research areas of one institute or that needs IT support on site should be provided by the IT of the respective institute.
Operational and geo-redundancy: These are mainly produced through institute cooperation or through cooperation between individual institutes and the IT of the research society. In terms of technology, floating IPs and the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) are used for this, with decisions being made on the basis of BGP announcements.

Update 14.01.2021

On 14 January 2021, Elastic announced that they are changing the license of Elasticsearch and Kibana from the Apache v2 open source license to the Server Side Public License (SSPL). Basically, this is a proprietary licence dressed up as open source. Users of SSPL software may be forced to release any supporting software under the SSPL as well. Even if the FAQ says otherwise, the wording of the licence remains binding. For the further use of Elasticsearch and Kibana, the risk of a legal violation has therefore increased significantly.