September 2022–August 2025

NebulOus will develop a novel Meta Operating System and platform for enabling transient fog brokerage ecosystems that seamlessly exploit edge and fog nodes, in conjunction with multi-cloud resources, to cope with the requirements posed by low latency applications. NebulOus will accomplish substantial research contributions in the realms of cloud and fog computing brokerage by introducing advanced methods and tools for enabling secure and optimal application provisioning and reconfiguration over the cloud computing continuum.

The key features of NEBULOUS are as follows:

  • New methods and tools for describing appropriately the cloud computing continuum, application requirements, and data streams; these methods and tools will be used for assuring the QoS of the provisioned brokered services.
  • Efficient comparison of available offerings, using appropriate multi-criteria decision-making methods that are able to consider all dimensions of consumer requirements.
  • Addressing in a unified manner the security aspects emerging in of transient cloud computing continuums (e.g. access control, secure network overlay etc.).
  • Intelligent applications, workflows and data streams management in the cloud computing continuum
  • Conducting and monitoring smart contracts-based service level agreements

  • Cloud Continuum accessibility
    • NebulOuS will help companies and consumers (e.g., citizens) benefitting from Cloud Computing Continuum, which makes data intensive services more accessible.
  • Cloud Continuum affordability
    • NebulOuS will unlock innovations in the big data & IoT industry because highly resource-intensive services will become economically viable. The easiest availability to data implies also a highest transparency and empowerment of the users (e.g., financial transactions, choice of market products, better planification of travels, etc.), which imply in many cases the production of public and social goods.
  • Open Source Community
    • The NebulOus platform will be an open source software framework, aimed at promoting innovation, since it will be easier and cheaper to be adopted. The main economic benefit of NebulOuS will be in the extension of the platform through different industries and domains thanks to the platform and their corresponding sustainability through a community of industries and experts. These combined aspects will permit to create valuable datasets and also digital services that dynamically could be applied to other domains (cross-domain transference of AI algorithms).