Europe’s Cloud-Edge Future Takes Shape: Testing Begins at Lab8ra
27, May, 2025
The Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS) has reached a major implementation milestone: testing activities have officially begun at Lab8ra, a multi-site testbed designed to enable the seamless integration and validation of cutting-edge cloud and edge technologies across Europe.
As part of Europe’s drives for technological sovereignty and digital resilience, the 8ra initiative and IPCEI-CIS support the development of a federated cloud-edge infrastructure enabling seamless workload mobility. It also contributes to the EU’s goal of deploying 10,000 edge nodes by 2030.
Lab8ra, one of 8ra’s cornerstone initiatives, brings this vision into practice. It is a distributed testbed network that connects 14 organisations across five countries, offering an open, collaborative environment where infrastructure, applications, and orchestration technologies can be tested together in realistic conditions. The lab will support pilots across national and operator boundaries—enabling, for instance, smart mobility services that can hand off seamlessly between different telco footprints.
Beyond simply serving as a technology sandbox, Lab8ra demonstrates a shift from design to deployment for IPCEI-CIS. With real-world use cases now being piloted and tested, the initiative moves closer to delivering scalable, pan-European cloud-edge services. The goal is to attract additional partners—from industry to academia—willing to validate their solutions, co-develop standards, and contribute to a truly European digital infrastructure.
This vision is being realised through collaboration among numerous IPCEI-CIS projects, including those led by Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, TIM, Engineering (ENG), Orange, 4iG, SAP, Siemens, Atos, and Tiscali. For example, Telefónica has begun deploying edge nodes across Spain, with plans for 17 sites integrated into the 8ra network. Deutsche Telekom emphasises building a telco-led reference architecture for federating and orchestrating these resources at scale. These efforts show how national infrastructure projects are converging into a single, cohesive European fabric.
A critical enabler of this convergence is the CISERO project, which plays a central role in developing shared components, APIs, and reference architectures that allow various projects to interoperate efficiently. CISERO ensures that results generated across the IPCEI-CIS ecosystem can be reused, shared, and validated within platforms like Lab8ra—amplifying impact and reducing duplication of effort. Together, 8ra and CISERO serve as accelerators, guiding IPCEI-CIS from concept to reality and ensuring that its contributions will outlive the funding cycles.
For the IPCEI-CIS community, this moment signifies momentum and maturing collaboration. Lab8ra is not merely a lab—it is the launchpad for Europe’s next-generation cloud infrastructure. As more projects move into testing, and as more organizations engage with the ecosystem, Europe’s vision of an open, federated, and sovereign cloud-edge continuum becomes increasingly tangible.
If you are interested in exploring how your organisation can use Lab8ra
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