Eight European technology organizations have joined forces to launch a new, interoperable, sovereign Edge cloud platform in Europe.

Named Virt8ra, this initiative is the result of collaboration between Arsys, BIT, Gdańsk University of Technology, Infobip, Ionos, Kontron, Mondragon Corporation and Oktawave.
It is coordinated by OpenNebula Systems, an open-source cloud and Edge[1] platform.
Virt8ra is the outcome of interoperability between several cloud providers and is available in six European countries: Croatia, Germany, 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, which was approved by the European Commission in December 2023.
Virt8ra currently offers virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters via a single control plane, while enabling applications to be easily deployed, run and migrated across different locations and cloud providers.
The consortium plans to add further locations and functionalities, eventually becoming an “IT continuum” that extends from 5G cell towers to cloud providers and data centers.
The Virt8ra testbed is our first step towards the development of meta-orchestration software that will foster a multi-vendor solution from technology providers across Europe. It is also the starting point for future Cloud-Edge continuum solutions that will boost Europe's data economy, digital sovereignty and competitiveness. said Miguel Martínez Vélez, Product Manager at Arsys.
The various partners involved in the project provide the platform's IT infrastructure.
Cloud provider Ionos offers bare-metal servers in its German data centers, while Kontron provides cloud resources from Slovenia and Mondragon in the Basque Country.
A new interoperable cloud edge platform initiative
Virtua8ra is not the first initiative in this field. In 2020, Gaia-X had the same objective.
After many difficulties and setbacks, the organization now claims to define only Cloud rules and policies based on European values.
This strategic turnaround has pushed former Gaia-X CEO Francisco Bonfiglio to create Dynamo, a collaborative platform, marketplace and European cloud ecosystem, whose business model is based on both annual subscription fees and monthly transaction fees.
A percentage of the total contract value (TCV) generated on the Dynamo platform is charged. This fee is then shared between Dynamo and the CSPs, further reducing their margin in an already highly competitive market.
Let's recall that GCTI only offers monthly registration fees to integrate cloud suppliers into its catalogs, and does not charge any percentage on the volume of contracts generated, enabling its CSPs members to maintain their margins, for greater competitiveness.
[1] Cloud Edge refers to an IT model in which corporate data is no longer confined to the datacenter, but generated at the edge of the network in ever-increasing quantities, to reduce latency, then processed and stored in the cloud, and used by increasingly globally distributed teams.
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