RAINBOW’s impact assessment is our effort to prove the applicability, usability, effectiveness and value of the RAINBOW integrated framework in industrial, real-life trustworthy services, applications and scenarios, demonstrating the RAINBOW artefacts, methodologies and services under pragmatic conditions against the project’s use cases (https://rainbow-h2020.eu/rainbow-use-cases-video-press-release/).
The current release of the RAINBOW platform allows the organisations to do what they do best without having to develop complex services for smart resource provisioning, monitoring and service orchestration. RAINBOW enables end users to take advantage of distributed infrastructure including local scaled-down network nodes, micro datacenters and connected devices.
We monitor the project’s impact at various levels. The improvements on the demonstrators of the project and the advancements in background intellectual property brought into the project by the academic partners, make those two groups obvious beneficiaries of the project’s work. Then, there are the benefits passed on from the project to the community, for example contribution to European policies and initiatives, as well as improving the innovation capacity of Europe. Finally, there is knowledge transfer and exploitation of the project’s results which comes in the form of sharing some of the project’s results with interested beneficiaries and organizations.
The results of the project’s research work, including but not limited to the orchestrator (interpreting the policies, resolving constraints and deploying), the Service Level Objectives (SLO) manager, the data management & analytics engine and the edge orchestration (interpreting the service graph, managing the control and the data flow), are expected to provide measurable improvements in business performance indicators, like decreased effort and investment cost for developing and managing the lifecycle of fog computing services, improved efficiency and performance of fog nodes due to more efficient service development and orchestration, increased productivity of business applications which rely on fog computing services, as well as increased trust feeling of data and services relying on fog-based services and IoT infrastructure in general.
Furthermore, the project has enhanced the achieved impact by organising online workshops and webinars which provide insights into and act as a demo of the functionality and offered services of the RAINBOW solution, i.e.:
- Data Management and Analytics Stack in Action (https://rainbow-h2020.eu/wp4-webinar-the-rainbow-data-management-and-analytics-stack-in-action-2/)
- Managing Service Level Objectives (https://rainbow-h2020.eu/wp3-webinar-managing-service-level-objectives/)
- Processing Data in the Fog (https://rainbow-h2020.eu/online-workshop-on-processing-data-in-the-fog-the-example-of-the-rainbow-fog-computing-platform-press-release/)
- Edge Orchestration (https://rainbow-h2020.eu/rainbow-workshop-on-edge-orchestration/)
- Security and Trust in Fog Computing (https://rainbow-h2020.eu/wp2-webinar-rainbow-security-and-trust-in-fog-computing/)
Other major dissemination activities include the presence in the 3rd workshop on cyber-security arms race (https://rainbow-h2020.eu/rainbow-project-will-co-chair-the-3rd-workshop-on-cyber-security-arms-race-cysarm-2021-cysarm21-in-collaboration-with-assured-puzzle-and-c4iiot/) and the 4th International Workshop on Cyber-Security in Software-defined and Virtualized Infrastructures (https://rainbow-h2020.eu/4th-international-workshop-on-cyber-security-in-software-defined-and-virtualized-infrastructures-secsoft/).
Last but not least, the RAINBOW project aims, through sharing the research work done in the context of this H2020 project, to contribute to open source initiatives and standardization groups dealing with cloud, fog and edge computing paradigms. As such, on-going efforts are in place to contribute to the Fog Adoption Focus Group, as well as to offer part of our research work as a standardization contribution to the Linux Foundation’s Centaurus project (https://www.centauruscloud.io/).
