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Portability in Multi-Provider Multi-Cloud/Edge Environments
Consistent application behaviour across multi-provider Cloud–Edge through open standards, containers and AI-driven orchestration.
Defining portability in the Cloud–Edge continuum
In computer science, portability refers to the ability of an application, service or workload to run on different platforms and environments without requiring significant modifications to its code or architecture. This capability allows solutions to remain independent of specific vendors or technologies, ensuring greater flexibility, efficiency and business continuity. Portability plays a crucial role in multi-provider Cloud–Edge architectures, where applications and services must seamlessly move between centralised clouds and distributed edge nodes.
Within IPCEI-CIS (Important Project of Common European Interest on Next-Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services), Europe is building a federated, secure and sustainable Cloud–Edge ecosystem designed to support the digital transformation of industries, public services and society. Portability is a key pillar, alongside interoperability: enabling applications to be developed once and deployed anywhere (across both cloud and edge environments) is essential to unlock future use cases and strengthen Europe’s competitiveness in the global digital landscape.
Why portability matters
In the Cloud–Edge continuum, environments are by nature heterogeneous: organisations operate across single-cloud deployments, federated multi-cloud infrastructures based on the same technology (e.g., OpenStack offered by multiple providers), or complex multi-cloud and multi-provider ecosystems where different stacks such as AWS, Azure or GCP coexist. In this context, portability becomes a critical enabler, allowing software to be executed reliably across such diverse infrastructures without code rewrites or disruptive reconfigurations.
At its core, portability provides two essential functionalities, ensuring applications behave uniformly and robustly across any deployment scenario:
Continuum: applications can be seamlessly relocated across infrastructures—from centralised cloud data centres to edge nodes—without disrupting operations.
Scalability: services can scale horizontally across distributed environments, so workloads follow demand by relocating to the most suitable resources, whether in the cloud to handle large-scale processing or at the edge to ensure low-latency responsiveness.
When continuum and scalability are combined, the result is true consistency: the guarantee that applications operate in a robust and predictable manner across any environment, from single cloud to multi-cloud, from multi-provider to hybrid deployments.
Design principles
Adeptic Reply’s modular, open architecture embeds portability by design and delivers the capabilities above through the following principles:
These solutions can be achieved thanks to the multi-layer orchestration architecture presented in this article, which logically organises orchestration levels both vertically and horizontally. This hierarchical orchestration model ensures that portability is not limited to isolated domains but spans the entire interoperable ecosystem. By distributing responsibilities across layers, it achieves both real-time responsiveness at the edge and strategic optimisation across larger infrastructures.
Benefits and challenges
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However, while portability offers significant benefits, achieving it in real-world multi-provider Cloud–Edge environments requires overcoming several challenges, including technical barriers and organisational aspects related to standardisation, integration and governance.
Below we outline the challenges and how Adeptic Reply’s solution mitigates them:
Heterogeneity of
infrastructures
Vendor lock-in
risks
Performance and
latency gaps
Security and compliance continuity
Challenge: each provider may rely on different technologies, including various virtualisation layers, network configurations and management tools. This heterogeneity can hinder the seamless migration of workloads.
Solution: Adeptic Reply’s solution relies on abstraction layers that decouple applications from the underlying infrastructure. Through the adoption of containerisation, virtualisation and orchestration platforms, services can remain portable regardless of the hosting environment.
Challenge: proprietary technologies and closed ecosystems can trap services in a single provider’s environment, limiting flexibility and creating strategic dependencies.
Solution: Adeptic Reply’s architecture relies on open standards (e.g., OpenAPI, GSMA APIs) and open-source components, ensuring freedom of movement across providers and preserving European digital sovereignty.
Challenge: moving applications between environments can introduce latency, bandwidth constraints or reduced performance due to differences in hardware and network capabilities.
Solution: the Adeptic Reply platform integrates AI-driven solutions, continuously analysing telemetry and observability data to select the optimal execution site. This guarantees that applications run where they can meet performance and compliance requirements, including sustainability.
Challenge: when services move across domains, ensuring consistent security policies, monitoring and compliance becomes complex.
Solution: the Adeptic Reply platform follows security-by-design approaches, so that security and compliance are natively supported by the architecture. Policy enforcement, identity management and auditing capabilities follow the service wherever it is deployed, ensuring trust and resilience across domains.
Once these obstacles are addressed, portability emerges as a cornerstone for the future evolution of Europe’s digital ecosystem, ensuring that applications and services can move freely and securely across the Cloud–Edge continuum.
By combining open standards, modular design, intelligent orchestration and observability, Adeptic Reply empowers enterprises, industries and citizens to fully exploit the benefits of the Cloud–Edge continuum. In this way, portability becomes not just a technical feature, but a strategic enabler of Europe’s digital future.