An effective platform for the cognitive cloud-edge continuum must address a number of unsolved challenges, many of them derived from constrained resource devices, infrastructure heterogeneity, and the need to meet criteria such as performance, resilience, security, data sovereignty, and energy efficiency. A disaggregated architecture is required, making use of AI, automation, and portability to manage and adapt resources and workloads, and to respond in real time to possible incidents and security threats. Edge application developers willing to speed up computation, save energy, and cut costs will need a way to combine their edge devices with the many resources available across the cloud-edge continuum. This innovative approach requires computationally-intensive data processing functions to be easily executed outside edge devices, sensors, and actuators. It is with that vision in mind that this project proposes a new distributed Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm for edge application management and smart orchestration, which will change how applications and services are deployed and executed in the cloud-edge continuum. Our AI-enabled adaptive serverless framework will provide applications with secure and portable access to a continuous data processing environment that abstracts the large-scale, geo-distributed, and low-latency capabilities provided by the cloud-edge continuum. The Consortium combines innovative open source companies in Europe, high-impact research organizations, and several edge application providers. Our research will be validated in relevant application domains, and will establish an ecosystem with links to industrial initiatives. This project will be transformative for the emerging EU edge ecosystem, providing resources and knowledge for start-ups, SMEs, and industry leaders seeking to look beyond centralized platforms and hyperscalers. It will increase European autonomy not only in data processing but also in strategic edge technologies.

The transition from H2020 to HE reflects an ongoing mega-trend in ICT: the convergence of Cloud, Edge, and IoT. This tendency has significant impact in Europe at scientific, technological, socio-economic, and geopolitical levels, as these traditionally separated fields are now converging into a much larger ecosystem now sharing a number of common challenges and key priorities. Upcoming RIAs should integrate and capitalise on ongoing efforts, with a vital aspect for Europe in this whole process being to successfully combine and consolidate the technology priorities defined by EU industry through the “European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud” and the advancements that the IPCEI-CIS will provide in the coming years. This transition and the move of the whole community of EC-funded projects and related initiatives towards a closer cooperation with industry is what the NexusForum.EU project aims to support and facilitate by focusing on consolidating research and policy along the Cognitive Computing Continuum, something crucial to effectively expand what the ongoing CSAs (particularly EUCloudEdgeIoT) are working on, thus providing a clear, consistent vision for future research and innovation topics in this EU strategic area. NexusForum.EU, through its unique consortium, will be able to effectively undertake a number of crucial activities, such as producing annual research roadmaps and policy recommendations; fostering collaboration between industry and academia; creating solid links with the IPCEI-CIS and the “European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud”; collaborating with past and present RIAs in order to promote a diverse EU research and innovation community; identifying relevant issues such skills development gaps; analysing the relationship with crucial topics such as Open Source and Open Standards; and engaging with forward-looking research and innovation communities and strategic initiatives outside Europe (starting with Japan & South Korea).

So many companies now, both long-established and newly emerging, from multiple industries like gaming, the Internet of Things (IoT), social networking and telecommunications, are focusing their business strategies on being able to provide innovative services and capabilities where latency is the key factor for quality of experience. Yet, despite the urgent need to define the foundational platform to deliver services at the network edge, at present, the companies that are developing next-generation solutions simply do not have a viable and cost-effective platform on which their low latency applications can become mainstream. Existing edge platform solutions require building and maintaining extremely heavy, expensive and complex deployments. Our innovative product, ONEedge, will provide an automated software-defined platform to build private edge computing platforms based on resources leased on demand in close proximity to the users and devices. A first prototyped version of the product is publicly available, and has been successfully demonstrated in several industrially relevant environments. We have existing customers interested in using this innovative product. The aim of this project is to bring ONEedge to industrial readiness and maturity for market introduction. ONEedge is targeting an untapped business opportunity, estimated at $2.0 billion by 2022 and expanding at a CAGR of 115%, by using an easy-to-adopt innovative business model fully based on open-source software and support subscriptions. OpenNebula Systems is an international business with a 23% compound annual growth rate in the last 4 years and seasoned experience in developing and bringing to market open-source enterprise products. Our conservative financial projection for the project shows a 50% Internal Rate of Return (IRR) in 5 years, and a €22m cumulative turnover and the creation of 69 new jobs during the first 3 years after the commercialization of the innovative product.

Cloud-based services have grown from basic computing services to complex ecosystems, comprising (virtual) infrastructure, business processes and application code. These advanced services also increasingly leverage the usage of Artificial Intelligence, including Machine Learning or Natural Language Processing techniques, raising the complexity even higher. Due to the cascade of dependencies among the different products and services, the need arose to bring more agility to the certification process of cloud-based services, e.g., using continuous monitoring and assessment, as evidenced by references to it in the certifications of the EU Cybersecurity Act (EU CSA). To transform the continuous assessment and certification concept into the complete realization of a Certification-as-a-Service (CaaS), several challenges need to be solved: 1) current proposed proofs of concepts for continuous monitoring lack interoperability at technology level, 2) the adoption of cloud and edge computing and the incorporation of regulations on specific topics or domains, such as AI, put significant strain on companies to comply with a multitude of different security schemes, 3) existing market fragmentation for continuous certification (scope, methodologies), hinder transparency and accountability in the provision of European cloud services, 4),smart tools and models need to be adopted to ease the agile application and implementation of the CaaS concept reducing complexity in the whole cloud certification value chain easing the adoption of CaaS by the different stakeholders. To overcome these challenges, the design and implementation of the EMERALD CaaS solution leverages the H2020 project MEDINA’s outcomes and advances them to TRL 7 in the EMERALD core. Two PoCs will be provided; one for composite certification and one for mapping requirements to upcoming AI certification schemes. EMERALD will pave the road towards CaaS for continuous certification of harmonized cybersecurity schemes.

O-CEI overarching goal is to pilot the imperative of accelerating the uptake and upscaling of innovative Cloud-Edge-IoT solutions, strengthening Europe’s competitiveness and open strategic autonomy by orchestrating cross-domain data sharing, minimising energy footprint, stimulating multi-sided marketplaces, and promoting open standards for virtualisation and interoperability. For doing so, O-CEI will feed with such innovative technologies, and a comprehensive framework, to eight multidimensional real-world pilots framed in key strategic sectors: electricity grid, electromobility, software-defined vehicles, agrifood and agriculture, logistics and urban environments. It will swiftly create and implement innovative solutions across the cloud continuum; and effectively address the needs of existing and emerging individual and cross-sector business value chains. By designing blueprints and providing utilities beyond the SotA, O-CEI will help project stakeholders (and 32 Open Call awardees) to achieve challenging objectives. All pilots are formed by technical and stakeholder actors covering the necessary value chains, having an outstanding cross-domain unifying thread: energy flexibility.