UBITECH participated at the kick-off meeting hosted by EURECAT in Barcelona, Spain (September 14-15, 2022) of the NebulOus Research and Innovation Action, officially started on September 1st, 2022. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon Europe Programme (Grant Agreement No. 101070516) and spans on the period September 2022 – August 2025. NebulOus aims to transparently manage all the layers of the cloud continuum stack, in an equivalent manner to an Operating System (OS), managing the available computing capacity to facilitate an adaptive application hosting environment, driven by the processing proximity to data sources and optimised based on the data involved, the defined QoS requirements and the regulatory, security or privacy constraints.
Therefore, NebulOuS will introduce an appropriate meta-operating system that encompasses brokerage capabilities across the cloud computing continuum. Specifically, it will enable the emergence of ad-hoc fog brokerage ecosystems that exploit IoT/edge and fog nodes, in parallel to multi-cloud resources to cope with the requirements of hyper distributed applications. Such applications will be managed by NebulOuS considering the full life-cycle support of edge and cloud resources to enable hosting nodes across organisational units of the same or different business entities or reach private datacentres of telecom providers, constituting ad-hoc cloud computing continuums.
Within NebulOus, UBITECH is responsible for the definition and design specification of the service-oriented, modular NebulOuS platform architecture. The architecture will describe in detail the integration logic and interfaces between the involved components and services of the backend core horizontal NebulOuS components and services, along with the upper layer application logic and existing tools. The design of the architecture will adopt a structured approach, following the main aspects of the OpenFog Reference Architecture and it will identify the scope of the NebulOuS components and services, and define the interrelations among their main functions and core data flows.
Moreover, UBITECH will drive the implementation of a secure network overlay that can quickly interconnect compute resources with one another, irrespectively of their physical location, in order to support the multi-cloud and cloud to edge vision of NebulOuS. UBITECH will build upon the most recent advancements in the SDN/NFV mechanisms (Open vSwitch (OvS) or VPN gateways) and the IO Visor Project (e.g., XPD/eBPF), in order to provide support for fog deployments through a secure network overlay mechanism.
