Last month, the UNLOCK-CEI project, completed its course with a successful review. The Horizon Europe project UNLOCK-CEI contributed to the acceleration of the deployment of the Cloud-to-Edge-IoT (CEI) computing continuum in Europe by focusing on the demand-side drivers and challenges to identify technology-driven innovation and business opportunities driving demand value chains.
Within the project, EGI Foundation led WP2, which focused on designing a framework to proactively address the needs and wants of the demand sector regarding Cloud Edge IoT (CEI) technology, as well as to identify the requirements to implement such solutions in specific products and services, helping understand their readiness to such solutions.
Understanding the Cloud-to-Edge-IoT Continuum
The 'Cloud Edge IoT continuum' is a fancy phrase explaining that the places where computing occurs are changing:
- Historically computing occurred in the company mainframe, or in departmental computers, then, more and more, on your desktop, your laptop, and then in data centres operated by companies like Amazon, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and even Microsoft. These 3rd party data centres provided computing power 'in the cloud' – meaning that you didn’t really need to know where it was happening. (And not meaning literally 'in the clouds' – this was a metaphor)
- Cloud computing has grown enormously – in terms of capabilities, affordability and adoption – but it has limitations. For some applications a key limitation is latency – the time it takes for data to be sent to a cloud application, processed and then sent back. This time varies greatly based on many factors, but data transmission times (to and from the cloud) can often approach 200 ms (milliseconds) – 1/5th of a second. For applications that need fast response, even this fast time may not be acceptable.
- Edge Computing is one response to this challenge – placing computing resources physically closer to where the data comes from and where the processing results are needed, for example in a nearby town.
- The IoT (Internet of Things) – in which real-world devices (things like cars, packages, manufacturing machines, and home appliances) are designed to include their own computing capabilities as well as communication links (usually to the Internet) to allow sharing of data back and forth with other applications. This is the opposite end of the Cloud Edge IoT continuum from the Cloud. Processing by IoT devices is not affected by latency , but for business reasons, most IoT devices (for example a refrigerator) have limited data storage and processing capabilities.
This explanation of the CEI Compute Continuum highlights the technical tradeoffs that are possible between cloud, edge, and IoT-based computing.
UNLOCK-CEI Project Focus and Market Dynamics
- The focus of the UNLOCK-CEI project was to determine how potential customers for services across the CEI continuum (which includes current customers of the cloud and IoT-based capabilities) might change their technology choices, or buy new services, that take advantage of the full spectrum of the CEI compute continuum. This perspective complemented a similar project (NAME) that identified how these new technologies might enable new applications and new markets in the EU.
- As background, the current market for cloud-based computing services in the EU is dominated by the so-called “hyperscalers” (AWS, Azure, Google). An earlier project (Horizon Cloud H-CLOUD , in which EGI was also a partner) identified a strategic opportunity for the EU to counterbalance this loss of economic sovereignty to non-EU companies by supporting the development of Edge and IoT computing capabilities, ideally by EU-based companies who could both lead in Europe and succeed in global markets.
- EGI participated in UNLOCK-CEI because the CEI Compute Continuum is also important for the research computing community. Research computing is experiencing dynamics similar to the broader enterprise computing market, with the rise of the grid, supercomputing, and then cloud computing, the growth in data volumes (which are increasingly difficult to transfer to distant data centres), and the need for local data processing (e.g. in situ data reduction at SKA nodes, IoT-type data collection across many disciplines, etc.)
EGI Contributions to UNLOCK-CEI
Within the project, EGI Foundation led WP2, which focused on designing a framework to proactively address the needs and wants of the demand sector regarding Cloud Edge IoT (CEI) technology, as well as to identify the requirements to implement such solutions in specific products and services, helping understand their readiness to such solutions.
The deliverable D2.2 ‘Preliminary Service Requirements and Market Scenarios’ unfolds as a strategic endeavour to comprehend the current and future market structures within the European Union, positioning itself as a valuable resource for stakeholders navigating the evolving landscape of CEI technologies. The deliverable offers stakeholders a holistic perspective on the service requirements essential for the successful deployment of CEI technologies. It illuminates key insights into the factors influencing market structures, providing a roadmap to navigate the complexities of the European market.
D2.3, the 'Final Position Paper on the Future Open European CEI Ecosystem' , describes likely market development pathways for the future open European Cloud-Edge-IoT (CEI) Ecosystem. It identifies key business and service requirements and likely market pathways, and it presents key actions that can be taken by market actors to optimize the CEI Ecosystem’s contribution to the EU economy and EU strategic autonomy. This information has been validated by industry participants in the Wave 2 workshops and Wave 3 interviews and the report reflects this industry input, as well as insights from UNLOCK-CEI's final event in Brussels, Belgium on 23 September 2024.
Our main conclusions from this final position paper:
- Technology-driven discussions have emphasized the importance of creating flexible workload orchestration tools that would allow multiple edge computing systems to work together, potentially through federation-type structures. However, examining the potential market opportunity for a large number of possible use cases highlights that there are just a small number – of use cases or applications for CEI technologies – that represent the bulk of the market opportunity. Of this smaller number of use cases, each one individually is big enough to support multiple suppliers, which means that orchestration and federated edge technologies are not required for these market segments to develop.
- At the same time, those use cases representing the biggest market opportunities are valuable, to a large degree, because of the large number of IoT devices that will need to be installed by each customer to make the application work – for some cases, potential quantities are several hundred million devices to be installed per year. R&D is needed to make sure that these devices can be reliably manufactured and operated in the field in such large quantities. This is both a significant engineering challenge, but the effort is worthwhile because there is such a significant market opportunity both within Europe and for export.
Future Outlook and Follow-Up Work
The EU is investing in large scale pilot (LSP) projects to further develop the technology and position EU players to exploit the opportunity. The first selected pilot is “O-CEI”, which concentrates on smart grid and smart metering and related use cases in the energy sector. This focus aligns with EGI’s identification of these use cases as one of 7 significant market pathways for the market, so the project is well-positioned for success.
This and other EU-funded LSPs will be coordinated by a new project, CEI-Sphere, but EGI is not involved in this project.
The methodologies used in UNLOCK-CEI will be exploited in other projects, and insights about the cloud-edge-IoT compute continuum will be applied in other EGI projects requiring these technologies.