Nowadays, to meet the demands of Industry 4.0, a seamless convergence between the different cloud domains (edge, edge and cloud) is key for industries to have a cloud-native intelligent orchestration layer capable of establishing the necessary mechanisms to ensure continuity of services as data m

In industrial environments, cloud services and the Internet of Things (IoT) converge, with the need to manage complex and diverse computing environments for service and infrastructure providers, a process called cloud continuum.

This is the second document of a series of three defining a reference architecture for the continuum. In the previous one, different building blocks were identified setting the path for the different aspects to be taken into account while defining the architecture.

This is the last document of a series of 3 for designing a Reference Architecture for the continuum. The first document of the series presented an initial version of a common taxonomy, considering it as a unified language for all actors of the value chain.

Cloud and edge computing are essential technologies in a computing continuum to ensure data is managed more efficiently – closer to the originating source rather than transmitting raw data to data centres. As recent studies suggest, data processing is moving closer to the edge.

While several application domains are exploiting the added-value of analytics over various datasets to obtain actionable insights and drive decision making, the public policy management domain has not yet taken advantage of the full potential of the aforementioned analytics and data models.