Future Cloud Cluster

Objectives

The aim of Future Cloud Cluster is to provide a forum for discussion and collaboration for research and innovation initiatives that address next generation Cloud Computing challenges and issues, including diverse forms of distributed computing (Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Edge, Fog, Ad-hoc and Mobile computing).

These comprises research on diverse areas encountered in Future Cloud Infrastructure and software management such as: the integration of heterogeneous devices ranging from high performance computing to Edge devices in computing infrastructures; the development and design of decentralised service-oriented systems; improvements to virtualization, data and workload abstraction technologies; service management and QoS; or the automation the organisation and management of the back-end resources.

In addition, the cluster studies research in the interoperability and portability of across these diverse and heterogeneous computing environments.

Moreover, we address research topics and trends associated with the hyper distribution of computing; These include the consideration of interoperability, portability, elasticity, self-organisation across many and heterogeneous resources in edge clouds, private enterprise clouds, aggregated cloud models and large Cloud set-ups; the orchestration and placement problems that address heterogeneity and trade-offs among consistency, reliability, availability, cost and performance.; and management models that cope with decentralisation and distribution of computing considering enhanced workload portability abilities, richer fault-tolerance verification with complexities at level of extreme scalability and parallelisation.

Today a number of research projects are already analysing these research areas from diverse perspectives and approaches. The main aim for this cluster is to foster collaboration among these existing research initiatives.

The goal of the cluster it is to create a critical mass of projects so to share experiences, collaborate on approaches and discuss challenges for adoption and future research.

Within this cluster we aim to offer a forum in which to collaborate in order to elaborate a broad EU perspective , so to establish means of project’s collaboration in two ways:

Technical

• Technical collaboration across projects
• Collaboration on scientific papers
• Share/Develop best practices to approach technical collaboration with Open Source Communities
• Developing roadmaps for future research

Dissemination & Exploitation

• Organisation of joint workshops with both academic and industry focus
• Support to individual projects by organising project innovation management events
  • Approach to EIT Labs, FIWARE or others identified in the future.
  • Organise joint exploitation workshops so to bring together researchers, technology transfer experts, legal experts, industrial experts, as well as external venture capital experts and get recommendations for projects.
• Whitepapers on specific topics.

During the summer of 2020 the Future Cloud Cluster has produced a revision of the research areas and challenges in the scope of Edge computing, Multi-Cloud, Computing continuum and Federated Cloud. These research areas and challenges express the vision of the cluster participants for future developments in European Funded Research and intend to serve as input from on-going and past project participants to the European Commission for the definition of new work programmes in the context of Horizon Europe. We have articulated our views for future research in this context around thirteen research areas which are depicted below:

Research Areas	Description	Main focus
Area 1: Federation of clouds	Facilitate Cloud and Edge interoperability and portability, taking into account data privacy, security and applicable legislation	Cloud Federation
Area 2: High Performance Heterogeneous Cloud Services	Management of high-performance computing and high-throughput computing resources	Multi-Cloud
Area 3: Security mechanisms across Clouds	Security controls across providers	Multi-Cloud
Area 4: QoS and SLAs	Enforcement of quality of service across cloud models	Cloud Continuum
Area 5: Knowledge-Based Service Harvesting and Acquisition	Ability to discover and compose services from existing cloud offerings marketplaces	Multi-Cloud
Area 6: Dynamic Configuration, Provisioning, and Orchestration of Resources	Orchestration of applications across diverse Edge and Cloud environments	Cloud Continuum
Area 7: Deployment and management of resources: in a decentralised, autonomous way	Autonomic resource management	Edge computing
Area 8: Resilience and Scale	Continuity in service provision for Edge limited operation	Edge computing
Area 9: Energy efficiency and Sustainability for Edge and Cloud Continuum	Energy optimisation in Edge and Cloud environments	Cloud Continuum
Area 10: Software defined Infrastructures and Novel composition models	Mechanisms for abstraction and virtualisation of resources	Multi-Cloud
Area 11: Novel Data Storage infrastructures and services	Strategies for data intensive application execution	Cloud Continuum
Area 12: Software application development for the computing continuum	Software engineering, design and programmability of applications in Cloud continuum	Cloud Continuum
Area 13: Research artefacts for the computing continuum	Researchers access to tools, data and infrastructures	Cloud Continuum

Contributing projects

Project	Name	URL
ACCORDION	Adaptative Edge/Cloud compute and network to support nextgen applications	https://www.accordion-project.eu/
AppHub	The European Open Source Market Place	http://www.apphub.eu.com
ASCETiC	Adapting Service lifecycle towards Efficient Clouds	www.ascetic-project.eu
BASMATI	Cloud Brokerage Across Borders For Mobile Users And Applications	http://www.basmati.cloud
BEACON	Enabling Federated Cloud Networking	www.beacon-project.eu
Cloudbutton	Serverless Data Analytics Platform	https://cloudbutton.eu/
CLOUDLIGHTNING	Self-organising, Self-managing heterogeneous cloud	www.cloudlightning.eu
CloudPerfect	Find YOUR perfect Cloud	cloudperfect.eu
CloudSocket	Business and IT-Cloud Alignment using a Smart Socket	http://www.cloudsocket.eu
CYCLONE	Complete Dynamic Multi-cloud Application Management	www.cyclone-project.eu
DECIDE	DevOps for trusted, portable and interoperable multi-Cloud applications towards the Digital single market	www.decide-h2020.eu
DITAS	Data-intensive applications Improvement by moving daTA and computation in mixed cloud/fog environmentS	www.ditas-project.eu
Elastest	An elastic platform to ease end to end testing	elastest.eu
ENTICE	Decentralised repositories for transparent and efficient virtual machine operations	www.entice-project.eu
EUBrasilCloudForum	Fostering and International Dialogue between Europe and Brazil	eubrasilcloudforum.eu
FED4IOT	Federating IoT and cloud infrastructures to provide scalable and interoperable Smart Cities applications, by introducing novel IoT virtualization technologies	https://fed4iot.org/
FogProtect	Protecting Sensitive Data in the Computing Continuum	https://fogprotect.eu/
H-CLOUD	The Forum for Strategy Focused Cloud Stakeholders	http://www.h-cloud.eu/
INPUT	INPUT Project	input-project.eu
IOSTACK	Software-defined Storage toolkit for Big Data	iostack.eu
mF2C	Towards an Open, Secure, Decentralised and Coordinated Fog-to-Cloud Management Ecosystem	www.mf2c-project.eu
MICHELANGELO	MICHELANGELO Project	www.mikelangelo-project.eu
ModaClouds	Model-Driven Approach for design and execution of applications on multiple Clouds	www.modaclouds.eu
mOSAIC	Open-Source API and Platform for Multiple Clouds	www.mosaic-cloud.eu
M-SEC	Multi-layered Security technologies to ensure hyper connected smart cities with Blockchain, BigData, Cloud and IoT	http://www.msecproject.eu
PaaSage	Model-based Cloud Platform Upperware	www.paasage.eu
PLEDGER	Paving the way for Next-generation Edge computing	http://www.pledger-project.eu
PHYSICS	oPtimized HYbrid space tIme Service Continuum in faaS
RAPID	Heterogeneous Secure Multi-Level Remote Acceleration Servies for Low-Power Integrated System and Devices	rapid-project.eu
RAINBOW	An open, trusted fog computing platform facilitating the deployment, orchestration and management of scalable, heterogeneous and secure IoT services and cross-cloud apps	https://rainbow-h2020.eu/
RECAP	Reliable Capacity Provisioning and Enhanced Remediation for Distributed Cloud Applications	recap-project.eu
SeaClouds	Agility after the deployment	www.seaclouds-project.eu
SmartCLIDE	The Stairway to Cloud	https://smartclide.eu/
SODALITE	SOftware Defined AppLication Infrastructures managemenT and Engineering	https://www.sodalite.eu/
SPECS	Secure Provisioning of Cloud Services based on SLA Management	http://www.specs-project.eu/
SSICLOPS	Scalable and Secure Infrastructures for Cloud Operations	www.ssiclops.eu
SWITCH	Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications	www.switchproject.eu

Deliverables

Federated Cloud Reference Architecture Position Paper – February 2021

This document elaborates on the Future Cloud Cluster inputs to the European Commission with our vision on Cloud Federation Reference Architecture, its rationale and comparison with existing Federation models. With this main purpose, we update the Future Cloud Cluster Vision for Future Cloud. Relying on it, the proposed  Reference Architecture aims at bringing a concrete materialisation of this vision. The Future Cloud reference architecture develops at the Cloud Federation, Cloud and Edge computing layers. For each of these layers, it elaborates on the necessary features and building blocks. In addition, we identify H2020 Future Cloud Cluster research projects that have provided or will provide research findings in that can contribute to the realisation of these building blocks. To finalise, we associate Future Cloud Research Areas to our reference architecture building blocks.

Research Roadmap Update –  August 2020

This document provides initial input from the Future Cloud Cluster to the Horizon Europe Cloud Research topics. This material the aims to constitute a useful input to the consultation process opened by the European Commission for future work programmes in the areas of Cloud Computing and Software, reflecting the vision brought from existing projects and collaborating institutions in Cloud and Edge related projects. In this document the participants have elaborated on Research areas and challenges in the areas of Federated Clouds, Edge computing, Computing continuum and Multi-Cloud for the coming years, while we propose an initial research roadmap for their development.

Research Roadmap Update – September 2017

This document presents the Cluster vision for 2030 including views on overall Cloud Computing challenges, Technological, Societal and European dimension of the challenges.  In addition to this, the document presents initial work on Research areas and its associated research and development areas

Research Roadmap Update – October 2016

This document updates the initial work of the Inter-cloud Challenges, Expectations and Issues Cluster concerning the identification of Research Areas and Challenges.

Inter-cloud Challenges, Expectations and Issues Cluster Position Paper – December 2015

It provides an initial research roadmap for Inter-Cloud computing development areas as well as classification on different areas of work for on-going and past projects.

• The paper identifies a Cluster’s vision of Inter-Cloud topics development by 2020 and it presents and prioritizes both research areas and specific research challenges.
• In addition, we produce a analysis of EU funded research projects in Inter-Cloud area in  which we have classified existing project’s work in relation to: Inter-operability approach, Topics and Scenarios addressed, Standards used and enabled Use Cases.

Next steps

• Set-up Technical Working groups for more detailed collaborations among project’s in the cluster.
• Participation in EU Research Events in 2017-2018

Contacts

• Ana Juan Ferrer, Atos
• Maria Tsakali, European Commission

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