The Eclipse Foundation is excited to announce the formation of the Eclipse Cloud Interest Group, aimed at empowering cloud providers, users, and industry vendors to independently build, manage, and operate cloud services, promoting freedom from vendor lock-in, interoperability, and resilience across diverse cloud environments.
Why This Matters
In today’s digital landscape, the need for flexible, scalable and interoperable cloud solutions has never been greater. Vendor lock-in can stifle innovation, limit choices, and create unnecessary barriers for cloud users. The Eclipse Cloud Interest Group believes that cloud autonomy and interoperability are the keys to unlocking the full potential of cloud technologies. Imagine being able to switch between cloud providers seamlessly, adopt services that best meet your needs, and ensure your operations remain resilient no matter the platform. That’s the vision we’re working to achieve.
How We’re Making a Difference
This initiative doesn’t prescribe specific technologies or methods for building cloud infrastructure and service. Rather, it focuses on creating a framework for interoperability and portability. Key components like virtualisation, containerisation, orchestration, observability, billing, and identity management should be accessible, switchable, and manageable across different platforms. The goal? To make multi-cloud environments not just possible but practical and efficient.
To support this goal, the group will focus on several key areas, including the emergence of critical cloud components necessary for the development of autonomous cloud infrastructures, cloud service portability, and multi-cloud managed services interoperability. The group will also investigate ways to ensure that cloud services not only meet interoperability requirements but also adhere to expected quality, performance, and service level standards.
Our work is rooted in open source technologies, which already power much of today’s cloud infrastructure. By leveraging existing projects like Eclipse Xpanse (portable managed services), Biscuit (decentralised authentication), the Eclipse Conformity Assessment Policy and Credential Profile (standards compliance), and XCP-ng (high-performance enterprise virtualisation), we’re building a strong foundation to empower developers and organisations alike.
Aligned with EU Values
The Eclipse Cloud Interest Group aligns closely with the European Union’s Data Act, which emphasises switchability between cloud providers. By supporting these regulatory goals, we’re helping to advance digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy, ensuring Europe remains at the forefront of innovation while protecting user choice and independence.
What’s Next?
We’re just getting started, but the Eclipse Cloud Interest Group already has strong support from organisations like Clever Cloud, Gaia-X, Vates, and Overnet. Together, we’re laying the groundwork for the future of cloud services, with plans to evolve this Interest Group into an Eclipse Working Group to drive specifications and development activities.
Join Us!
Whether you’re a cloud provider, user, vendor, or part of the broader open source community, we invite you to join us in shaping the future of the cloud. Together, we can create a more autonomous, flexible, and interoperable cloud ecosystem.
The Eclipse Cloud members will be this week at FOSDEM with a BoF session planned in Track C, Saturday February 1st 15:00. A number of workshops to present the Interest Group are also planned in Barcelona on March 3rd (collocated with the Mobile World Congress) and in London on March 31st (collocated with Kubecon). Don’t miss the opportunity to learn more firsthand!
Stay tuned for updates, opportunities to contribute, and ways to get involved. Subscribe to our mailing list and become part of this exciting journey toward a better cloud future!
