In early 2024, the European Union launched the largest open source project in the history of the continent: the Important Project of Common European Interest on Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS). As part of this initiative, supported by 12 EU Member States (including Italy), more than 120 European companies are working together to build a stack of open source technologies for managing and deploying applications across the cloud-edge continuum. So far, this is the main collective effort in Europe to regain its technological sovereignty in a market largely controlled by Big Tech corporations where "proximity cloud" providers play quite a marginal role. The IPCEI-CIS is also expected to support the emergence of new open source projects and to help them stay and flourish in Europe as part of a larger ecosystem based on mutual cooperation and interoperability.
