The objective of the AENEAS project is to develop a concept and design for a distributed, federated European Science Data Centre (ESDC) to support the astronomical community in achieving the scientific goals of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The scientific potential of the SKA radio telescope is unprecedented and represents one of the highest priorities for the international scientific community. By the same token, the large scale, rate, and complexity of data the SKA will generate, present challenges in data management, computing, and networking that are similarly world-leading. SKA Regional Centres (SRC) like the ESDC will be a vital resource to enable the community to take advantage of the scientific potential of the SKA. Within the tiered SKA operational model, the SRCs will provide essential functionality which is not currently provisioned within the directly operated SKA facilities. AENEAS brings together all the European member states currently part of the SKA project as well as potential future EU SKA national partners, the SKA Organisation itself, and a larger group of international partners including the two host countries Australia and South Africa.

In recent years Cloud Services for Synchronization and Sharing (CS3) have been widely deployed in the research and educational space. The services are operated and funded by major e-infrastructure providers, NRENs (National Research & Education Networks) and major research institutions. The CS3 services have become successful on a national level at the scale of individual institutions and started becoming an indispensable element of daily workflows for hundreds of thousands of users including researchers, students, scientists and engineers. The community deploying these services grew bottom up and found its home at the yearly CS3 conferences (cs3.cern.ch). However, these services remain largely disconnected, and they are developed and deployed in isolation from each other. At the current state of maturity and community uptake however, combining these various systems and services would allow to boost open-science by presenting a joint, coordinated service to the users in the research and education space on a pan-European level. CS3MESH4EOSC implements a service for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) with a built-in sustainability model using the on-premise service delivery by utilizing existing key technology enablers: Open Cloud Mesh (OCM) standardized protocol and EduGAIN service. It consolidates and integrates the existing application ecosystem by promoting vendor-neutral APIs and protocols following the open-source strategy for delivering services -- a platform for a thriving application ecosystem in EOSC. CS3MESH4EOSC empowers service providers in delivering state-of-the-art, connected infrastructure to boost effective scientific collaboration across the entire federation and data sharing according to FAIR principles.The project delivers the core of a scientific and educational infrastructure for cloud storage services in Europe through a lightweight federation of existing sync/share services and integration with multidisciplinary application workflows.