NeoNephos Meeting Series ​

It's MCK time! The next IPCEI-CIS Workstream 2 Multi Cluster Kubernetes (MCK) meeting session will be held on the 16th of June from 10:00-11:30 am CET.

Agenda:

• 40 min: Confidential Computing Revisited: Usability, Market, Standpoints and Trends

  To reach sovereign control over your data processed in the cloud, Confidential Computing (CC) allows your virtual machines (VMs) to run inside separate, hardware-enforced, encrypted memory regions. In this way, your data-in-use is protected against malicious code and adversaries on the host. We will present findings from our analysis that focuses on AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX introduced within the last 3 to 4 years as the most viable path to broad adoption.

  Key highlights include optimistic market projections ranging from 25% to 63% CAGR, supported by relevant standards, communities and regulatory frameworks that drive the usage of CC. However, CC does not come for free: OS dependencies, VM lifecycle complexity, remote attestation challenges and reduced service levels have to be accounted for. As a result, open-source and commercial frameworks are being developed that simplify the deployment of CC by a) "lifting and shifting" existing app code to confidential VMs and b) adding levels of attestation to increase the assurance for trusted components. In addition, we will summarize perspectives from 40+ professionals across 20+ organizations. Their feedback can be categorized into optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic views. The realist cohort is the largest: practitioners who have run proof-of-concepts, place CC at a medium technology readiness level, and are actively preparing their organizations for broader deployment within the next few years. In summary, CC is not a "magic bullet" for security. CC assures confidentiality and integrity of data-in-use that must be complemented by data-at-rest and data-in-transfer protection. Also, the hypervisor and host have to act in a benignway for availability.

  The report was funded by SAP through its Apeiro Reference Architecture contribution to the IPCEI-CIS EU project, with Cyberus Technology acting as development and consultation partner. SAP has committed to donating all of Apeiro to the NeoNephos Foundation.

• 40 min: From Distributed Services to Semantic Discovery: How ORD, UMS, and the Knowledge Graph Make Metadata the Backbone of Open Cloud-Edge Ecosystems

  Distributed, federated landscapes work only if the services running across them can discover, understand, and integrate with each other without central coordination. Today, that integration is mostly manual: APIs, events, and capabilities are described in fragmented ways, and consumers have to be wired up one provider at a time.

  This session introduces the metadata stack that ApeiroRA's ORD-UMS-KG Workstream is building to remove that friction: Open Resource Discovery (ORD), the Unified Metadata Service (UMS), and the SAP Knowledge Graph. ORD is a decentralized protocol that lets every provider describe its resources in a uniform, machine-readable way. UMS collects and aggregates that metadata across the landscape and makes it queryable for platforms — without point-to-point integration. The Knowledge Graph turns the aggregated metadata into a semantic representation that AI agents can reason over, enabling cross-provider API discovery and query generation at scale.

  We will walk through the role each layer plays, how they fit together end-to-end, and what this means in practice: a foundation for self-describing services, automatic integration across provider boundaries, and agent-ready semantics — not as a future vision, but as the working substrate for the open, federated cloud-edge ecosystems ApeiroRA stands for.

👉 As always, join the meeting here.