Despite their proliferation as a dominant computing paradigm, cloud computing systems lack effective mechanisms to manage their vast amounts of resources efficiently, leading to severe resource waste and ultimately limiting their applicability to large classes of critical applications that pose non-moderate resource demands. This creates a significant need to lift existing technological barriers of actual fluidity and scalability of cloud resources towards promoting cloud computing as a critical cornerstone for digital economy. ACTiCLOUD proposes a novel cloud computing architecture for drastically improved management of cloud resources, targeting 1.5x increase in resource efficiency and more than 10x in scalability. By utilizing modest investments on hardware intelligence that enables true resource disaggregation between multiple servers, we will progress current state-of-the-art in hypervisors and cloud management systems promoting holistic resource management at the rack scale and across distributed cloud sites. On top of this, we will evolve the ecosystem around in-memory databases, a core component for extremely demanding and highly critical classes of applications that up to now have faced severe difficulties in matching their resource requirements with state-of-the-art cloud offerings, with a final goal to provide cost-efficient and highly performant DataBase-as-a-Service (DBaaS) cloud platforms. ACTiCLOUD builds on top of cutting-edge European technologies for cloud servers brought into the project by Numascale and Kaleao, and extends OnApp's MicroVisor, an innovative hypervisor to virtualize resources at the rack-scale. Furthermore it joins the forces of highly acclaimed academic institutions to address key research challenges and extend the capabilities of OpenStack and JVM. Finally, it applies the foreseen innovation to MonetDB, the column-store database pioneer, and Neo4j, the world-leader in graph databases.

Developing new security paradigms, architectures, and software, for more secure and trustworthy ICT systems and services has clear social, scientific, and market motivation. This motivation is becoming stronger due to the changing threat landscape; over the past decade we are witnessing an ever-increasing amount of cyberattacks on the Internet. We believe that to advance the field of cybersecurity, we must act proactively and in synergy, instead of being reactive to cyberattacks. We propose SHARCS, a framework for designing, building and demonstrating secure-by-design applications and services, that achieve end-to-end security for their users. SHARCS will achieve this by systematically analyzing and extending, as necessary, the hardware and software layers in a computing system. This holistic approach is necessary, as no system can truly be secure unless every layer is secured, starting from the lowest one. We will measure the effectiveness of the SHARCS framework by using it on a diverse set of security-critical, real-word applications. The applications have been chosen from three different domains, medical, cloud and automotive, to demonstrate the platform independence capabilities of SHARCS. SHARCS will provide a powerful foundation for designing and developing trustworthy, secure-by-design applications and services for the Future Internet.

Cloud innovations have had a major impact on the IT industry but not yet on networks. The danger is that 5G will be a niche industry providing basic connectivity for the cloud applications and services boom. The NGPaaS project envisages 5G as: a build-to-order platform, with components, features and performance tailored to a particular use case; developed through a “Dev-for-Operations” model that extends the IT industry’s DevOps approach to support a multi-sided platform between operators, vendors and verticals; and with revised Operational and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) to reflect the new parameters and highly dynamic environment. NGPaaS can enable 5G to become central to a cooperative future with cloud developers, by removing the technological silos between the telco and IT industries. NGPaaS builds on 5G-PPP phase 1 projects and lays the foundation for large-scale phase 3 deployments and industrial usage, through a stepped validation of several Telco, IoT/vertical and combined scenarios culminating in a live test in Paris-Saclay campus that can incorporate innovative SMEs selected for showcasing NGPaaS’s operational, service and business benefits.