The largest open source project in EU history
In a 2020 Joint Declaration, all 27 EU Member States stated that innovative cloud computing and data processing capacities are an essential resource for Europe’s economic recovery, long-term competitiveness, and climate sustainability. To achieve this strategic objective, a new Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS), worth near 3 billion EUR, was approved by the European Commission in late 2023. Led by Germany and France, this initiative has also been actively supported by Belgium, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and The Netherlands.
Cloud & edge computing are crucial for an interconnected and resilient Digital Europe, as well as for the EU’s geostrategic position and competitiveness in the global economy. Nowadays, however, most of the open source technologies used to build cloud services are controlled by non-EU entities. In fact, Big Tech has gradually colonised the open source world over the last couple of decades, and the role it plays in some major cloud computing projects is very significant. This undermines Europe’s digital sovereignty.
The IPCEI-CIS Project by OpenNebula Systems (2024-2028) offers an alternative model based on leveraging European open source for mobilising the many technological and innovation capabilities in the continent and creating together a Next-Generation European Platform for the Datacenter-Cloud-Edge Continuum. This powerful “made in EU” alternative will offer vendor neutrality and a sustainable future based on global collaboration, but fully aligned with the values and priorities of the European Union.
Next-Generation European Platform for the Datacenter-Cloud-Edge Continuum
Our IPCEI-CIS Project is focused on researching, developing, and carrying out a pilot industrial deployment of Europe’s first next-generation open source platform for the datacenter-cloud-edge continuum. It will support the dynamic provisioning, application portability, multi-cloud interoperability, federation, and uniform multi-provider management of the emerging hyper-distributed computing continuum. The main outcome of the Project is a powerful but flexible open source middleware platform that will enable companies to build distributed Private Edge Cloud environments by aggregating infrastructure resources along the whole cloud-edge continuum. Users will be able to easily combine their on-premise datacenters with additional capabilities offered by public clouds and 5G/edge providers.
This product will support next-generation infrastructure services, advanced cloud extensions, smart data processing services developed by other IPCEI-CIS partners, and external contributions and modules. This new open source solution will be based on OpenNebula, which will be enhanced with major innovations guided by the real needs of eight research-driven use cases in strategic EU domains: Mobility, Energy, Industry & Manufacturing, Health, Tourism, Agriculture & Environment, and Media. Our platform will help to reduce the overall carbon footprint associated with the rapidly expanding global cloud infrastructure, offering a secure and easy-to-use vendor-neutral alternative that democratizes access to edge computing and promotes competition in the EU cloud market.
Acknowledgements
Initiative funded by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation and Civil Service through the ONEnextgen Project: Next-Generation European Platform for the Datacenter-Cloud-Edge Continuum (UNICO IPCEI-2023-003) and co-funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
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