Eclipse Xpanse: Enabling digital sovereignty through portable cloud services

"Eclipse Xpanse: Enabling digital sovereignty through portable cloud services" presented by Marco D’Angelo (Huawei), explores how portable cloud services can reduce lock-in and support digital sovereignty across cloud environments. This session was recorded at Open Community Experience 2026 (OCX26) in Brussels, Belgium, as part of the Main Track.

This session examines Eclipse Xpanse as an approach to enabling portability of managed cloud services across providers.

Xpanse introduces a service-level abstraction that allows complete application stacks, including infrastructure, dependencies, and integrations, to be defined once and deployed across different cloud environments.

Unlike container portability alone, the approach integrates with provider control planes, including identity, billing, monitoring, and service management, enabling deeper interoperability across heterogeneous cloud platforms.

The architecture combines a declarative configuration model with orchestration engines and plug-in based integrations for multiple providers, including Kubernetes, OpenStack, and hyperscaler environments. It supports lifecycle management, including provisioning, monitoring, migration, and teardown.

The session also outlines how Xpanse aligns with emerging regulatory requirements and data space frameworks, and how it integrates with broader initiatives such as Gaia-X to address both service and data portability.

Key topics covered
- Eclipse Xpanse architecture
- cloud service portability
- vendor lock-in mitigation
- multi-cloud orchestration
- infrastructure as code integration
- control plane integration
- service lifecycle management
- data and service portability
- digital sovereignty frameworks

Why this matters
Portability at the service level is required to avoid long-term dependency on single cloud providers. Without it, architectural decisions become irreversible.

About OCX26
Open Community Experience 2026 is the Eclipse Foundation’s flagship event, held in Brussels, Belgium. It brings together developers, architects, and industry leaders to explore open source technologies across domains including tooling, AI, automotive, and research, with a focus on practical implementation and collaboration. Learn more at https://www.ocxconf.org/

Chapters
00:00 introduction and context
01:05 digital sovereignty overview
03:20 cloud dependency landscape
04:10 origin of Eclipse Xpanse
05:17 service portability concept
06:10 sovereignty beyond cloud providers
08:04 market concentration and risks
10:21 enterprise software dependency
13:26 AI ecosystem and open source
19:31 need for portable architectures
20:12 Xpanse use cases and positioning
21:48 architecture and orchestration model
24:32 service lifecycle management
26:48 provisioning and orchestration flow
28:05 regulatory alignment
30:05 ecosystem collaboration
32:26 integration with Gaia-X
34:12 positioning within broader ecosystem
36:23 key takeaways

Видео Eclipse Xpanse: Enabling digital sovereignty through portable cloud services канала Open Community Experience