4 posts tagged with "dissemination"

We are excited to announce that ORCHIDE now has its own YouTube channel! You can find us at @ORCHIDE-EU.

The channel is the place to see the project in action. We have published a presentation video that introduces ORCHIDE — the New Space context it addresses, our cloud-native, unikernel-based approach to onboard edge computing, and the platform we have built to bring Platform-as-a-Service to satellites.

Head over, watch the videos, and subscribe to follow along — and stay tuned, as ORCHIDE moves towards its open-source release!

Last week we had the privilege of presenting ORCHIDE at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam on 23 March 2026. Adèle Karam Hankache (Thales Alenia Space) and Sergiu Weisz (POLITEHNICA București) took to the stage with a talk titled "Bringing Cloud-Native PaaS to Space: Onboard Edge Computing for Satellites".

We shared how the New Space paradigm and cloud-native technologies are reshaping Earth Observation, moving from single-mission satellites with limited onboard processing towards flexible, multi-application platforms that process data directly in orbit. ORCHIDE answers this need with a complete Platform-as-a-Service for satellites: a ground system to develop, build and deploy applications, and an onboard orchestrator to run them on heterogeneous hardware.

The talk dived into the technical ecosystem the project has built:

• Unikernels with MirageOS and Unikraft for small, fast and secure application images.
• urunc, the open-source OCI runtime that lets unikernels run as if they were containers and plug straight into Kubernetes and its derivatives.
• ukAccel, an in-house component giving unikernels access to hardware accelerators such as GPUs, DPUs and FPGAs.
• K3s as the lightweight cloud-native orchestrator, paired with Argo Workflows, distributed storage and a Zot registry.

We closed with an end-to-end demonstration of the "Satellite as a Service" vision and a look ahead, from edge computing on a single satellite towards federated, multi-satellite systems with cross-satellite workload distribution.

The ORCHIDE project will be made available to the community as an open-source project — stay tuned and follow us to contribute to the journey!

We were glad to take part in the EOS Workshop 2026, the tenth edition of the workshop, held at CERN in Geneva on 9–11 March 2026. Organized by the CERN EOS Team, the workshop is a platform for exchange between the developers, users and sites running EOS, bringing together both long-time members of the community and newcomers.

EOS plays a concrete role in ORCHIDE: we rely on it as the POSIX-compliant distributed storage solution behind our Storage Manager, providing the interoperability our onboard space platform needs to exchange data across a heterogeneous, multi-node cluster. Presenting at the workshop gave us the opportunity to share how a space-edge platform makes use of EOS.

It was a valuable exchange, and we are grateful to the CERN EOS Team and the community for the welcoming and insightful discussions. We look forward to continuing the conversation as ORCHIDE moves towards its open-source release!

Had the privilege of presenting at the "Cybersecurity: Funding Opportunities and Strategic Collaboration in Europe" organized by the Romanian Space Agency, POLITEHNICA București. We have described the ORCHIDE project and the steps it takes in terms of security posture and security management for its components. It's clear that as our reliance on space technology grows, so does the need for robust security frameworks that can operate in the unique environment of space.