Advancing Europe’s Cloud-Edge-IoT ecosystem from Cagliari
On 30 June and 1 July, we joined partners in Cagliari for the Cloud-Edge-IoT Open-Source Hackathon, a two-day, hands-on event bringing together pilots, developers, researchers and students to work on real European digital infrastructure challenges.
Co-organised by CEI-Sphere, the Large-Scale Pilots O-CEI and COP-PILOT, and the Eclipse Foundation, and hosted at the University of Cagliari, the hackathon focused on practical, reusable solutions across the cloud-edge-IoT continuum.
Over one hundred participants from pilot teams, sphere communities, open-source projects and university labs came together to prototype and test ideas in a multidisciplinary setting. From mobility and energy use cases to industrial optimisation scenarios, teams worked side by side, combining technical expertise with domain and market perspectives to address real interoperability, orchestration and sustainability challenges.
The hackathon centred on three challenge tracks, each grounded in pilot realities and open-source technologies:
- Sustainable edge-cloud with Eclipse Zenoh:Exploring distributed image processing and geo-distributed content delivery across edge and cloud deployments, to understand how smarter data flows can reduce bandwidth and support more energy-aware computing.
- Distributed energy services with COP-PILOT OpenSlice:Orchestrating containerised services for energy data generation, optimisation and visualisation across simulated edge and cloud domains using Kubernetes and OpenSlice.
- AI-assisted domain modelling with Eclipse Jakarta EE and the Hourglass Model: Designing applications that use external LLMs and AI engineering techniques to generate and analyse enterprise domain models, aligning stakeholders, capabilities and standards.
Across two intense days, teams moved from problem framing to concept, prototype and pitch: understanding the challenges, forming multidisciplinary teams, hacking with mentor support, validating with pilot representatives and domain experts, and finally presenting their solutions to peers and a jury. Deliverables ranged from concise solution concepts and technical proofs-of-concept to pitch decks and proposals for open-source contributions and pilot follow-up.
BluSpecs supported this hackathon as part of its role in CEI-Sphere, helping connect Large-Scale Pilot needs with structured collaboration formats, sphere rhythms and practical events that turn use-case pain points into shared solutions. The same operations playbook and timelines that guide CEI-Spheres throughout the year, stand-ups, deep dives and health checks, also underpin focused moments like the Cagliari hackathon, ensuring they deliver concrete outcomes rather than one-off conversations.
The event concluded with awards across the three tracks, recognising relevance to pilot needs, quality of execution, clarity of communication and open-source reuse potential, with additional visibility planned across CEI-Sphere, O-CEI, COP-PILOT and Eclipse channels. More importantly, it created a foundation of prototypes, ideas and collaborations that can feed back into spheres, pilots and shared assets, from interoperability frameworks to open-source repositories.
At BluSpecs, we see this hackathon as a glimpse of how Europe’s cloud-edge-IoT ecosystem can work in practice: pilots, universities and open-source communities co-creating solutions with clear paths to reuse and adoption. We’ll continue to support CEI-Sphere and its partners in turning structured collaboration, spheres, workshops, hackathons, into tangible impact for the Large-Scale Pilots and the wider EUCloudEdgeIoT initiative.