Eight European technology organizations have teamed up to launch a sovereign Edge cloud platform in Europe.
Dubbed Virt8ra, the testbed platform is a collaboration between Arsys, BIT, the Gdańsk University of Technology, Infobip, Ionos, Kontron, Mondragon Corporation, and Oktawave. It is coordinated by OpenNebula Systems, an open-source cloud and Edge platform.
Virt8ra is the result of interoperability across multiple cloud providers and is available in six European countries: Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain.
The project is part of the Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS) that was approved by the European Commission in December 2023.
Virt8ra currently offers virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters through a single control plane, while allowing applications to be easily deployed, executed, and migrated across different locations and cloud providers. The consortium plans to add more locations and features, eventually becoming a "computing continuum" that will range from 5G cell towers, to cloud providers and data centers.
“The Virt8ra testbed is our first step at Arsys towards the development of the meta-orchestration software that will enable a multi-vendor solution from technology providers across Europe. It is also the kick-off for future cloud-Edge continuum solutions that will boost the European data economy, digital sovereignty, and competitiveness,” said Miguel Martínez Vélez, chief product officer at Arsys.
The various partners involved in the project are providing IT infrastructure to the platform, with Ionos offering bare-metal servers in its German data centers, Kontron providing cloud resources from Slovenia, and Mondragon in the Basque Country.
The Virt8ra initiative is supported by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation and Civil Service through OpenNebula Systems’ ONEnextgen project, and co-funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU through the RRF.
This is not the first attempt to create an interoperable cloud platform in Europe.
Gaia-X, motivated by the market dominance of US hyperscalers, was established in 2020 with the goal of creating such a platform.
In 2021, reports emerged that the initiative was suffering "chaos and infighting," and has since taken a new direction. In 2024, CEO Ulrich Ahle denied that Gaia-X ever planned such a platform, telling DCD “there was maybe the impression that we wanted to create a competitor to the hyperscalers and create our own European cloud. But the real intention in what we are doing is to define policies and rules for Europe based on European values, and these services can also be fulfilled by hyperscalers."
Gaia-X has since become involved in the "Fulcrum" project, which aims to bring together the small and medium-sized cloud providers in Europe and to exploit the wide geographic distribution that is typical of European cloud providers.
The previous CEO of Gaia-X, Francesco Bonfiglio, is also looking at developing a decentralized European cloud - Dynamo. Any cloud vendor that is signed up to Dynamo can deliver their customer's services from this catalog alongside their core offering.
Despite this, Bonfiglio has expressed concern about the long-term feasibility of any such offering, with hyperscalers now launching sovereign cloud regions.
“We have three years. In 2017 we had 26 percent of the market share, now we are at 10 percent. We can’t turn that back, so in three years it will be zero. Meanwhile, you have American providers buying data centers and gigawatts of energy," said Bonfiglio.