The Omnibus project will remove interoperability barriers and security concerns to realise the full benefits of the cloud
continuum. It will encourage and enable greater uptake of cost-effective, environment-friendly, and innovative cloud,
edge, and IoT solutions in Europe.
Omnibus focuses on distributed applications – a particularly important and rapidly growing class of applications that is
uniquely positioned to benefit from the cloud continuum. This class of applications is highly interactive, latency sensitive
and intended to process high volumes of data. Examples include cloud-hosted Internet-of-Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical
Systems (CPS), on-line business analytics, real-time data monitoring, and industrial control. Omnibus itself will feature
two main use cases smart farming and water management and smart storage as well as multiple case studies that cut across the above application domains. Existing approaches to deploy, manage and secure such applications in the cloud continuum are insufficient, and none unify the cloud continuum and make it uniformly accessible to applications.
The core innovation of the Omnibus open and integrated platform is the use of a universal
application code format – WebAssembly [6, 7] – that allows applications to execute across the cloud continuum with
native performance. Omnibus will provide optimised WebAssembly-enabled run-times and services on cloud, edge,
and IoT systems. This will simplify the development and deployment of distributed low-latency and high-throughput
applications in the cloud continuum.