In this article, we highlight one of our industry partners, CloudSigma, a Swiss-based cloud service provider offering flexible Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions.
CloudSigma offers an advanced Cloud-As-A-Service platform for System Integrators, Managed Service Providers, Value-added Resellers, Datacenter Providers, IT Distributors, and Telcos. The platform enables IT service providers to rapidly deploy sovereign, hyper-scaler-independent cloud solutions while allowing them to utilise their in-country infrastructure.
Role in the project
CloudSigma’s main technical contribution is to validate performance and efficiency parity across x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) use cases, with a particular focus on I/O-intensive applications and containerized mixed-workload environments. Validation activities will be conducted on CloudSigma infrastructure and benchmarked against comparable public cloud offerings to establish a robust performance baseline. Building on the results of this evaluation, the project will support the potential commercialisation of higher-performance ARM and RISC-V platforms, enabling their deployment and adoption within public cloud environments as competitive alternatives to traditional x86-based infrastructure.
Networked Object Store
This use case will evaluate performance and functionality using a baseline methodology based on industry-standard benchmarking frameworks, including YCSB and CloudSuite data serving and caching workloads, executed on both ARM and x86 host platforms. The solution must demonstrate full compatibility with Kubernetes-based runtime environments and support AWS S3 APIs to ensure seamless integration with existing cloud-native applications and storage ecosystems. In addition, the architecture must provide a unified global namespace spanning hosted, private, and edge infrastructure, enabling consistent data access, management, and portability across distributed deployment environments.
Regular Storage
This use case focuses on validating cloud-scale storage cluster performance using a set of standardised fio workload profiles designed to assess storage behaviour under realistic operating conditions. Testing will be conducted using the nominal hardware profile and common fio configuration settings defined in Deliverable 2.1, ensuring consistency and repeatability across platforms. The primary objective is to demonstrate performance parity with, or superiority to, mainstream x86-based systems in I/O-critical scenarios. The evaluation will encompass a comprehensive range of workload patterns, including random and sequential read and write operations, as well as mixed-workload profiles, to provide a thorough assessment of storage performance characteristics across different architectures.
Containerised Microservices
This use case focuses on evaluating the HIGHER platform in its nominal configuration through the deployment and execution of containerized microservice-based applications. Performance validation will be based on K-Bench and MLBench benchmark suites, which provide representative mixed compute and I/O workload profiles reflecting modern cloud-native environments. The scope includes assessing the effectiveness of Kubernetes-based orchestration as well as support for serverless-style managed workloads, ensuring the platform can meet the operational requirements of contemporary application architectures. Evaluation will be conducted against the CPU, memory, and AI performance targets defined in Deliverable 2.1, with the objective of demonstrating that the platform can efficiently support demanding cloud-native and AI-enabled services.