The Eclipse Cloud Interest Group aims to empower individual cloud providers, cloud users, and cloud industry vendors to explore and assess ways to independently build, manage, operate, and consume the cloud services of their choice, from the providers of their choice.
This includes fostering:
- Freedom from vendor lock-in
- Scalability, resilience, and flexibility in cloud environments, whether public, private, or hybrid
- Interoperable, adaptable, and easy to manage systems
- Operational independence and resilience, reducing reliance on any single cloud provider and enhancing the overall security and performance of cloud services
- Diverse markets across cloud services and service providers
The Eclipse Cloud Interest Group does not prescribe any particular technology or method of building cloud infrastructure and services; they can be traditional scale-up applications or cloud native services or any other implementation technology of choice. However, the interoperability would require:
- Assessing key components and elements of cloud infrastructure and services—such as virtualization, containerization, runtimes, orchestration, observability, billing, IAM, service descriptions, etc—can be switched, managed, and monitored efficiently across diverse cloud platforms
- Exploring access to the service enablement layers within cloud providers in order to enable managed services autonomy
- Promoting open technologies and specifications to facilitate cloud interoperability across a diverse ecosystem
This effort builds upon open source technologies for building cloud infrastructure and cloud applications. While compatibility between platforms is an important goal, ,the group focuses on laying the groundwork for interoperability and exchangeability between diverse cloud environments.
The Eclipse Cloud Interest Group focuses on preliminary assessments, collaborative exploration, and preparation to enable future advancements in open source technologies and frameworks that promote cloud interoperability.
This interest group will facilitate cloud service autonomy for Cloud Service Providers, Users, and Industry Vendors by addressing foundational technical and procedural aspects.
The primary objective of the Eclipse Cloud Interest Group is to foster innovation and preparing for the development of open source cloud technologies, protocols and specifications that enable multi-cloud interoperability and align with regulations like the Data Act, while supporting digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy
To achieve this, the interest group will focus on key areas, including:
- Emergence of Critical Cloud Components : Facilitate the emergence of essential cloud components necessary for the development of autonomous cloud infrastructures, cloud Services Portability & Autonomy : Assess and promote foundational technologies and processes that could enable effective switching between cloud providers.
- Multi-Cloud managed services Interoperability : Leverage Open Source technologies to investigate ways to achieve services interoperability and portability across different cloud platforms.
- Conformity and Quality Assurance : Explore approaches to ensure that cloud services are not only interoperable and deployable across multiple cloud providers but also meet the expected quality, service level agreement (SLA), and performance standards..
- Technologies Enabling this vision : Encourage and evaluate technologies that align with the vision of strategically autonomous cloud infrastructures. This includes projects like:
- Xpanse: Creating managed services for any cloud, focusing on portability.
- Biscuit: A decentralized authentication token supported by a strong community.
- Verifiable Credentials & Linked Data: Implement approaches from (among others) Gaia-X for secure and verifiable data management.
- Conformity Assessment Profile: Ensure compliance with established standards to maintain interoperability and reliability.
- XCP-ng: XCP-ng is a high performance enterprise level virtualization platform with a rich ecosystem that can be integrated in an entire stack to do management and backup for it.
This Interest Group is committed to fostering collaboration, conducting foundational research, and establishing the groundwork for eventual advancements in open source technologies and frameworks for cloud interoperability.