Open Cloud Services and an Open Cloud Computing Stack
0Open Cloud Services and an Open Cloud Computing Stack: a full stack combination from infrastructure to application provision
Presented at EclipseCon 2023 in Ludwigsburg, Germany by Alexander Diab (Open Source Business Alliance e.V.) and Swaroop Akulu Raghupathy (Huawei Technologies Co., LTD.).
The European Union has made strong moves to secure its digital sovereignty with a common vision for 2030, based on enabling a fairer European Cloud Market with vastly improved data connectivity infrastructures. To have the Open data ecosystems and secure data infrastructure that the EU Data Strategy with Data Act, Digital Market Act & Digital Services Act dictates, both open and portable Data and Cloud Services are required.
The current European Cloud market , particularly the IaaS segment is dominated by hyperscalers who have several competitive advantages over the rest of the market players mainly due to scale of their broad investment capabilities that only hyperscalers themselves can benefit from.
There are many Cloud Service Providers (CSP) that can provide infrastructure, however they generally can struggle in providing the variety of managed software services that can compete with the service catalogs of the hyperscalers. This then hinders these CSPs from being able to attract the volume of enterprises needed to allow them to scale. Likewise, if an Open Cloud Services that can fill these CSPs service catalogs are only able to be bound to a specific few Infrastructures in isolation, this will also not create the diversity and fairness needed for the European Cloud Market either.
Having Open Cloud Services on an Open Infrastructure is fundamental to securing the digital sovereignty the European Union desires, enabling growth of a wider more evenly spread pool of European Cloud Market participants that can participate in the Open Data EcoSystems. This is also essential to allow open and portable Data and Cloud Services created by communities such as Eclipse Tractus-X to be deployable and implementable anywhere.
The Eclipse Foundation Xpanse aims at providing an integrated open-source framework and solution for all cloud providers that allows services portability across any clouds, providing the Open Cloud Services part of this couple.
The intention of the Sovereign Cloud Stacks (SCS) is to provide an open-source cloud computing stack ready to be utilized by cloud service providers as well as operators of private cloud environments. By the community driven effort to build to standardized stack of components from the main upstream projects from LF, CNCF and OIF SCS in itself is an open, free and digital sovereign alternative to the main proprietary solutions in the market. The certifiable standards secure portability of main computing workloads between different environments and vendors as well as foster collaboration between organisations, which operate as well as utilize SCS, with respect to taking part in the same ecosystem and sharing operational knowledge and experiences.
Both Eclipse XPanse and SCS form a foundation upon which participants in open data and infrastructure ecosystems are enabled to create innovative digital solutions and can take investments decisions on cloud infrastructure and application provisioning without the risk of being tied to a single vendor. This talk will showcase on how the two communities cooperate to demonstrate a combined open cloud technology solution for infrastructure and application deployment and operation.