NebulOuS – A Meta Operating System for the Cloud Continuum

Project acronym:

NebulOuS

Grant Agreement No.

101070516

Programme:

Horizon Europe – HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-05 (RIA)

Duration:

1 September 2022 – 31 December 2025

Total project budget:

€8,478,106.00

Funding support for 7bulls.com:

€625,000.00

Coordinator:

Fundacio Eurecat

Project website:

nebulouscloud.eu/

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CONTEXT AND CHALLENGE

Cloud computing has evolved beyond single platforms into a continuum that spans data centres, multiple public clouds, on-premises infrastructure, edge nodes, and fog environments. As applications become increasingly distributed across these heterogeneous resources, managing deployment, optimisation, and governance grows significantly more complex.

Existing cloud management approaches are often limited to individual environments or providers, making it difficult to coordinate resources, ensure service levels, and maintain control across distributed infrastructures. NebulOuS addresses this challenge by focusing on how hyper-distributed applications can be managed coherently across the entire Cloud Continuum.

See results and impact

Project objective

NebulOuS is a Horizon Europe R&D project running from September 2022 to December 2025, bringing together a European consortium of research institutions and technology companies.

Within the project, 7bulls.com leads the design and implementation of the Kubernetes-based architecture that enables dynamic adaptation to complex and heterogeneous computing infrastructures, supporting scalability and efficient resource deployment across the Cloud Continuum.

Project scope and roles

The objective of the NebulOuS project is to develop a Meta Operating System that enables the brokering, orchestration, and management of hyper-distributed applications across the Cloud Continuum. The project aims to support adaptive deployment, optimisation, and scaling across multi-cloud, edge, fog, and on-premises environments while addressing governance, blockchain-backed service-level agreements (SLAs), and lifecycle management requirements.

Industrial Research

Technical focus

NebulOuS combines several key technical components to support hyper-distributed application management:

Fog brokerage to integrate and coordinate cloud, fog, edge, and on-premises resources,
Blockchain-backed SLA mechanisms using smart contracts to support non-repudiation, transparency, and trust in multi-provider environments,
Intelligent lifecycle management to coordinate applications, data, and workflows across distributed infrastructures,
Model-driven quality assurance and anomaly detection to support robustness and reliability across diverse deployment scenarios.

Together, these elements form the foundation of the NebulOuS Meta Operating System.

Experimental Development

Target users

NebulOuS is designed for organisations operating across diverse computing environments, including:

small, medium, and large enterprises running applications across multi-cloud, edge, fog, and on-premises infrastructures,
organisations new to cloud, fog, or edge computing, seeking structured approaches to system design, deployment, and migration,
organisations already using cloud technologies that aim to optimise architectures, reduce inefficiencies, and avoid vendor lock-in.

Results and impact

Results and expected outcomes

The NebulOuS project delivers a Meta Operating System designed to broker and orchestrate hyper-distributed applications across the Cloud Continuum. The result is a unified software framework that integrates fog brokerage, governance mechanisms, and lifecycle management to support coordinated operation across multi-cloud, edge, fog, and on-premises environments.

Within the project, 7bulls.com delivers the Kubernetes-based architectural layer that enables dynamic adaptation to heterogeneous infrastructures. This contribution provides a practical foundation for deploying and managing distributed workloads across diverse computing environments under a single orchestration and governance model.

Coordinator: Fundacio Eurecat
Consortium partners include: Telefonica I+D, UBITECH, University of Oslo, Activeeon, Ubiwhere, and 7bulls.com

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