A Cognitive Serverless Framework
for the Cloud-Edge Continuum

This is our common response to the call of the European Commission to work together towards a brighter, more sustainable, and more inclusive digital future for a technologically-sovereign Europe.

An effective platform for the cognitive cloud-edge continuum must address a number of unsolved challenges, many of them derived from constrained resource devices, infrastructure heterogeneity, and the need to meet criteria such as performance, resilience, security, data sovereignty, and energy efficiency. A disaggregated architecture is required, making use of AI, automation, and portability to manage and adapt resources and workloads, and to respond in real time to possible incidents and security threats. Edge application developers willing to speed up computation, save energy, and cut costs will need a way to combine their edge devices with the many resources available across the cloud-edge continuum. This innovative approach requires computationally-intensive data processing functions to be easily executed outside edge devices, sensors, and actuators.

It is with that vision in mind that this Horizon Europe project (2023-2025) will focus on a new distributed Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm for edge application management and smart orchestration, which will change how applications and services are deployed and executed in the cloud-edge continuum. Our AI-enabled adaptive serverless framework will provide applications with secure and portable access to a continuous data processing environment that abstracts the large-scale, geo-distributed, and low-latency capabilities provided by the cloud-edge continuum.

Inspired by the SovereignEdge.EU initiative, the unique Consortium behind this project combines iconic European open source companies, high-impact research organizations, and innovative edge application providers. Our research will be validated in relevant application domains, and will establish an ecosystem with links to industrial initiatives. We expect this exercise of joint innovation to become a true transformative force in the emerging EU edge ecosystem, far beyond the formal end of the project, providing valuable resources, cutting-edge knowledge, and powerful European open source technology to those start-ups, SMEs, and industry leaders seeking to look beyond centralized platforms and hyperscalers.