FACIS is a German-funded innovation project. FACIS stands for Federation Architecture for Composed Infrastructure Services. In plain words: we develop tools and shared rules that help enable digital services to be used across cloud providers, infrastructures, and borders. This contributes to a future where using digital services across different providers can become as seamless as mobile roaming, where your phone moves across different mobile networks. Today, this is far from simple: different systems, different rules, different digital worlds.
The answer is federation: independent companies and organizations collaborating based on shared rules, standards, and technical mechanisms, without giving up control of their own systems and services. Providers remain independent - but they are no longer isolated.
For federation to work, systems also need to understand and interact with each other. The technical term for this is interoperability: enabling systems and services from different organizations to work together without having to build a custom integration for every new partner.
This broader vision is pursued by the 8ra Initiative, bringing together more than 120 projects from twelve EU Member States to develop a Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum. FACIS is one of these projects, contributing to the overall vision of an interoperable ecosystem in which cloud and edge resources from different providers can work together across organizational and technological boundaries.
8ra connects the infrastructure.
FACIS enables collaboration.
Federation in practice
Picture what that means in practice. A hospital in Spain uses AI to help analyze medical scans, relying on computing power from a provider in France. Demand suddenly rises, or a data center experiences an outage. Data must be processed in another location – and nothing stops, because the workload simply moves. This vision, often described as Cloud Roaming, could make Europe’s digital infrastructure more resilient and flexible.
But a new digital roaming era won’t build itself. It needs shared rules, tools, and support for real-world adoption. That is where FACIS comes in. We develop and test concrete building blocks that help turn federation from an architectural concept into something organizations can actually use. Our technical components are developed as open source, making them available for others to use, adapt, and build upon.
FACIS at a glance
What FACIS delivers
Three kinds of results: tools you can use, shared rules and frameworks that enable collaboration, and real-world demonstrators that put our approaches to the test.
Rules
What all sides agree on
Tools
What you can run
Examples
What proves it works
An SLA, or Service Level Agreement, defines what a provider commits to when delivering a service: how fast it responds, how reliable it is, how often it may be unavailable. FACIS develops a shared framework and common approach to SLAs for multi-provider environments. The goal is to make service commitments more consistent, transparent and machine-readable – so they can increasingly be processed and monitored automatically across providers.
A security principle where no user, system, or request is trusted by default. Every request is verified, no matter which provider, network or organization it comes from.
FAPs are ready-made and reusable blueprints for recurring challenges in federated environments: how to establish trust, how to bring a new partner on board, and how to manage cross-provider service interactions. Instead of designing every partnership from scratch, FAPs capture reusable approaches that can be adapted to your individual scenario.
Contracts between organizations, in standard digital form. Different organizations can create, negotiate, sign, verify and store them automatically instead of drafting each one by hand.
Deploying services across heterogeneous cloud and edge infrastructures can quickly become complex. Services are set up through configuration and clicks, rather than programming. Running a service across several providers should not require a team of specialists – the engine makes it something a small IT team can do.
A proof of concept is a small working version of an idea, built to show it holds up in reality – tested in real conditions – rather than only on paper. FACIS puts its building blocks to work in aviation, manufacturing, artificial intelligence and cloud services – and publishes the results for anyone to use and learn from.