This is an edited version of the eco Podcast interview with Thomas Niessen*
FACIS is part of a much larger European ecosystem: the 8ra initiative. Its goal is to create a European cloud-edge continuum. It sounds a bit like Back to the Future, but what it really means is this: seamless, interoperable infrastructure across national borders. Connecting all these projects and actors requires strong coordination. Thomas Niessen heads the IPCEI-CIS coordination office and organizes the various European 8ra cloud-edge continuum projects at a higher level.
Thomas, why does Europe need a cloud-edge continuum – in other words, a distributed, interoperable, multi-provider infrastructure?
Thomas Niessen: When we started around 2022 with IPCEI-CIS and 8ra, two developments came together that really got things moving and significantly accelerated the initiative.
First, cloud technology in Europe had already arrived on the market. At the same time, it was clear that there were different cloud ecosystems. Once you had chosen one ecosystem and were running your applications there, it was relatively difficult to combine them with other systems or to switch to another provider. This is the well-known lock-in effect.
The key question was: does it really have to be so labor-intensive to move from one provider to another—both in terms of staff and cost? That was one of the core ideas behind the multi-provider cloud-edge continuum. The term is a bit unwieldy, but the decisive word is multi-provider. Can we create a shared architecture that allows workloads to be moved seamlessly from one cloud provider to another? And can we increase users’ freedom of choice and investment security in this way?
The second development was the shift of workloads from the cloud to the edge – closer to where data is generated or used, for example in production environments. There were various reasons for this: confidentiality, efficiency, and simply the fact that it makes little sense to push huge volumes of data into the cloud if 99 percent of it is discarded later on. It is far more efficient to pre-filter data at the edge.
Latency also plays a role—a very simple physical phenomenon. The farther a computer is from the data source, the longer data transfer takes. In business-critical applications, this can be a real obstacle.
What solution does a cloud-edge continuum offer here specifically?
Thomas Niessen: The idea was to create an architecture that both enables switching between providers and allows flexible decisions about which workloads belong in the cloud and which should remain closer to the data source – without requiring a complete redevelopment every single time.
These factors ultimately set the 8ra project in motion. In doing so, we address many of the buzzwords currently being discussed – sovereignty, for example. At its core, it is about avoiding dependencies and giving users freedom of choice when selecting services. Resilience is another key topic. A multi-provider cloud-edge continuum makes it possible to distribute workloads freely and redundantly and avoid single points of failure. If provider X has an outage, production doesn’t grind to a halt – workloads can be shifted.
What other advantages are there?
Thomas Niessen: Investment security is also crucial. Especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, there is a major concern about getting stuck in an environment after investing – one that may no longer meet their requirements in a few years. This architecture is designed to remove exactly that concern.
But the benefits are not limited to cloud users. Software providers also benefit. Today, a company might develop HR or accounting software and want to run it in the cloud; but every provider has its own nuances, even with standardized approaches. This means that developers must not only ensure that their software is always up to date, but also that it can be adapted to different cloud providers. A common architecture would eliminate much of that effort, making deployment on new platforms much easier. The situation therefore has potential for both the user and the provider.
And beyond that, the underlying challenges are the same elsewhere—for example in Japan. Lock-in, resilience, sovereignty: there are already initial discussions with other economies that are very interested in 8ra and in how similar approaches could be transferred. So this is important for Europe—but not only for Europe.
For people who haven’t been dealing with this topic for very long, this all sounds incredibly complex—with many names and organizations: FACIS, IPCEI-CIS, the 8ra initiative. Could you bring some order into this and explain how it all fits together and what your role is?
Thomas Niessen: I’ll try. IPCEI-CIS is indeed a rather bureaucratic term. IPCEI stands for “Important Projects of Common European Interest,” a European funding instrument. It doesn’t sound particularly exciting and initially reduces the whole thing to a formal funding framework. After IPCEI-CIS was approved by the European Commission, we quickly realized that the name didn’t really reflect what we wanted to achieve. We didn’t want to simply implement a funding program; we wanted to create an infrastructure and architecture that would be relevant for all of Europe. That’s how the idea of 8ra emerged.
8ra is the initiative that bundles IPCEI-CIS and related activities to build a shared European infrastructure and architecture. The Latin term ora refers to the “edge,” and we write it as “8ra,” with the number eight symbolizing infinity and representing the continuum.
That’s quite a lot of symbolism.
Thomas Niessen: Yes, it’s very figurative.
Under the 8ra initiative there are many projects: more than 110 partners from 12 EU member states. FACIS is one of these projects. It is led by eco, implemented within the 8ra framework, and funded via IPCEI-CIS. In short: IPCEI-CIS is the bureaucratic framework, 8ra is the technical framework, and FACIS is an individual project within this ecosystem.
That makes the connections much clearer—thank you. Let’s move from theory to practice. With so many actors, national projects, providers, and stakeholders—how do you coordinate all of this?
Thomas Niessen: I hope no one ever looks too closely at what I actually do. Jokes aside, it is indeed complex. As I already mentioned, we’re talking about more than 110 partners from 12 member states. On top of that, it’s a highly integrated project. These aren’t isolated ships passing in the night – the projects are interconnected.
For example, one project develops a data-center monitoring dashboard and needs a transaction tool from another project to integrate that dashboard in a meaningful way. This means one project relies on another project’s results. We have to coordinate both the technical implementation and the timing so that, in the end, joint results are delivered.
How can this be implemented without losing track?
Thomas Niessen: A key instrument for this is the master plan. It maps all participants, their results, dependencies, critical paths, and independent activities. In addition to the individual projects, there are also cross-cutting topics such as security or energy efficiency that affect all projects. The goal is to create transparency and an overview.
Another crucial point is communication. The coordination office initiates alignment processes and organizes workstreams between related projects. It enables regular exchange through meetings and digital platforms where data is shared and progress documented.
Reporting is a less glamorous but indispensable part of the work. The funding comes from 12 different sources, each with its own rules, plus the requirements of the European Commission. With a total volume of more than three billion euros, extensive reporting obligations are necessary to ensure that public funds are used responsibly.
In this sense, the coordination office acts as a bridge. If the supervisory board—with representatives of the member states and industry—is the captain steering the ship, and the individual projects are the engine room, then the coordination office is the engineering team translating between the two.
A great image. You’ve already mentioned some benefits for users and providers. Could you give concrete use cases that illustrate the value of a federated cloud-edge architecture?
Thomas Niessen: We have two main focus areas.
The first is foundational work – basic technologies. For example, we develop architectural blueprints that serve as a recipe for providers and users: how do you set everything up so interoperability is ensured? There are already testbeds where resources from different providers in different member states can be used together. They are not yet “virtual hyperscalers,” but the idea is to combine resources across provider boundaries according to specific needs. One example is Lab8ra, which can already be used today – even by organizations that are not 8ra partners.
In the area of federated learning, we are also building testbeds that enable machine-learning processes across platforms using existing resources.
Interconnection services designed specifically for high bandwidth and low latency—provided by companies such as DE-CIX—are another key building block for the later application layer.
So this brings us to the core question: what is the benefit of 8ra once it is fully implemented?
Thomas Niessen: A major focus is on industry, for example in the area of digital twins. This is an important step toward the “industrial metaverse”- from factory planning to virtual factory tours. In the long term, this leads to significant productivity gains through the control of ongoing operations via edge and cloud platforms.
One concrete example is a planned project for a decentralized platform to operate AI-supported robot systems. Robots in different factories can learn together and become more efficient together—an essential factor not only for mass production, but also for highly customized manufacturing down to batch size one. Here, the edge aspect is central again, because high latency is unacceptable in robot-assisted production.
Mobility is another exciting area. An Airbus project, for example, uses aircraft as flying edge devices. This enables end-to-end connectivity between onboard processes and ground services for the first time—which increases both efficiency and safety.
There are certainly medical use cases as well, right?
Thomas Niessen: Yes, absolutely. In medical research, it is crucial to have large amounts of data available in order to understand the effectiveness of therapies or identify patterns. At the same time, this involves highly sensitive data – patient data is subject to strict data protection requirements. Federated learning makes it possible to work with large amounts of data without storing it centrally, thereby protecting anonymity and patient rights. This is an area with enormous potential.
In logistics – for example fleet management – new requirements are also emerging, especially due to electromobility, for instance with regard to battery capacities. Projects combine edge-based road and traffic data with just-in-time logistics to make processes more efficient – and ideally reduce traffic jams, so that as drivers we no longer have to wonder why all the parking spaces are being blocked by trucks.
The application fields are extremely diverse, yet the underlying need is always the same. For which other industries are these solutions also useful?
Thomas Niessen: The construction sector is also highly interesting – not single-family homes, but major projects such as ports or transport infrastructure. Thousands of trades often have to be coordinated. Cloud-edge architectures can make processes much more efficient by capturing construction progress directly on site and linking it to overall planning. I hope this will someday mean that airports or train stations – even in Berlin or Stuttgart – will be completed in under 25 years.
And there are application areas you might not think of at first – such as agriculture and food production. Edge systems capture soil and weather data, which is then analyzed in the cloud to optimize irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting. In the end, this also improves logistics – so that apples don’t rot in the field while the juice-factory truck is still stuck somewhere.
That makes the topic very tangible. Final question: where should Europe’s cloud-edge ecosystem ideally be in 2030—and what contribution does FACIS make?
Thomas Niessen: I hope we can say that 8ra has enabled real freedom of choice for users in Europe – that they can choose applications that best support their processes, regardless of where they come from. Even in 2030 we will still use applications from the US, but without fundamental dependencies. Decisions should be made purely on technical grounds.
I also hope that FACIS contributes to end-to-end transparency and trustworthiness along service chains and enables business-critical processes in the cloud. For that, we need reliable service-level agreements and digital contracting—this is exactly where FACIS comes in. Ideally, in 2030 we won’t even talk about cloud and edge anymore. It will be taken for granted—like electricity. We don’t think about where it comes from; we’re simply glad it works.
* This interview has been translated into English from the original transcript.
