PIACERE – Programming Trustworthy Infrastructure as Code in a Secure Framework

Project acronym:

PIACERE

Duration:

1 December 2020 – 30 November 2023

Total project budget:

€4,424,250.00

Funding support for 7bulls.com:

€493,500.00

Funded by:

The European Union under Horizon 2020 – “Industrial Leadership – ICT”

Website:

https://www.piacere-project.eu/

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CONTEXT AND CHALLENGE

Infrastructure is no longer assembled manually or configured once. It is defined, deployed, and evolved through code across highly heterogeneous environments – spanning cloud platforms, edge nodes, fog layers, and on-premises systems. As a result, infrastructure management increasingly resembles software development in pace and complexity, but without the same guarantees of correctness and safety.

Many existing Infrastructure-as-Code approaches focus on isolated tools or individual lifecycle steps, such as provisioning or configuration, and often treat security and trustworthiness as add-ons rather than built-in concerns. As a result, infrastructure definitions can become fragile, difficult to verify, and harder to manage safely as systems scale and evolve.

PIACERE addresses this challenge by rethinking IaC as a continuous, verifiable process. Instead of treating infrastructure definitions as static configuration, the project focuses on how infrastructure can be modelled, validated, generated, operated, and corrected as a coherent system – with security and trust embedded from design time through runtime.

See results and impact

Project objective

The objective of the PIACERE project was to create an integrated DevSecOps environment in which Infrastructure-as-Code becomes trustworthy by design. The project aimed to enable infrastructure to be modelled at a high level, automatically translated into executable code, and continuously verified throughout its lifecycle.

By embedding security, verification, and operational controls from design time through runtime, PIACERE sought to ensure that complex infrastructures could be deployed and evolved with confidence across heterogeneous computing environments.

Project scope and roles

PIACERE was a Horizon 2020 research and innovation project running from December 2020 to November 2023, delivered by a European consortium of research institutions, technology providers, and public-sector partners.

Within the project, 7bulls.com contributed to the development of the PIACERE platform as part of the consortium, supporting the implementation of tooling and workflows that bridge infrastructure modelling, provisioning, and operational validation within the integrated DevSecOps framework.

Industrial Research

Technical focus

PIACERE establishes a unified technical foundation for managing Infrastructure-as-Code across its full lifecycle. Key components include:

DOML (DevOps Modelling Language) as a unified modelling language for describing infrastructure at a high level
Automatic generation of Infrastructure-as-Code for multiple target tools and languages, including Terraform and Ansible
Design-time verification and static checks to support security and trustworthiness before deployment
Unified orchestration workflows that connect modelling, code generation, provisioning, and operations
Runtime monitoring, anomaly detection, and self-healing mechanisms to maintain service continuity
Integrated security policies and compliance controls that remain effective as infrastructure evolves

Together, these elements treat infrastructure as software that can be analysed, verified, and managed systematically.

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Operational workflow

The PIACERE workflow spans the full infrastructure lifecycle. Infrastructure is first described using high-level models, which are then verified and automatically translated into executable code. This code is used to provision and operate infrastructure across heterogeneous environments.

During operation, monitoring components detect anomalies and trigger self-repair mechanisms where applicable. Security and compliance checks are applied continuously, ensuring that trustworthiness is maintained not only at deployment time but throughout the system’s evolution.

Target users

PIACERE is designed for organisations that manage complex, distributed infrastructure environments, including:

DevOps and platform teams responsible for cloud, edge, fog, and on-premises systems
Organisations seeking to move beyond script-based Infrastructure-as-Code toward model-driven, verifiable workflows
Teams that require security, reliability, and compliance to be embedded into infrastructure processes from the outset

Results and impact

Results and expected outcomes

The PIACERE project delivers an integrated DevSecOps platform in which Infrastructure-as-Code is treated as a first-class software artefact. By combining modelling, automated code generation, verification, and runtime controls, the project demonstrates how infrastructure can be deployed and operated with built-in trust and resilience.

The resulting approach supports heterogeneous environments and enables infrastructures that are observable, adaptable, and capable of recovering from anomalies through self-healing mechanisms, while remaining aligned with security and compliance requirements.Consortium partners: Fundacio Tecnalia Research & Innovation, Ericsson, Telecomunicazioni SpA, Hewlett Packard Italiana, Politecnico di Milano, PRODEVELOP, Ministrstvo za Javno Upravo, XLAB, 7bulls.com, among others

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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement No. 101000162