11 posts tagged with "orchide"

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!

It is with great pride that we share the completion of our fifth and final technical Milestone Review, the Demonstration Review, held on 23 April 2026. After nine iterations and a long road of design, development and integration, this review was dedicated to demonstrating the ORCHIDE solution in action. In this milestone we invited industry partners to showcase the progress of the ORCHIDE project and foster future collaboration between the consortium and stake holders.

During the meeting we presented the results of the Work Package 5, showing that ORCHIDE:

• Distributed demonstration — orchestration of applications across a multi-node onboard cluster.
• Flight heritage hardware demonstration — running ORCHIDE on KP Labs' Leopard hardware, including a comparison of clean, ORCHIDE-capable and ORCHIDE-enabled images, and benchmarks across native, OCI Unikraft and OCI Ubuntu runtimes.
• Integrated, end-to-end demonstration of the full ground-to-space pipeline.
• Verification and validation of the system performances.

These demonstrations confirmed that ORCHIDE complies with a variety of hardware and software platforms, satisfies the needs of the mission scenarios. We also shared an honest assessment of the trade-offs of unikernel-based workloads in space, from their reduced attack surface and strong isolation to the still-maturing networking and filesystem support.

A heartfelt thank you to the whole consortium and our Advisory Board for making this journey possible. The ORCHIDE adventure continues!

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!

Our fourth Milestone Review, the Demonstration Readiness Review, took place on 03 December 2025. With seven iterations and seventeen deliverables behind us, this review confirmed that ORCHIDE is ready to enter its demonstration phase.

The focus of this milestone was the integration and validation work of Work Package 4. We presented how the building blocks developed across WP3 were brought together into a functional prototype, covering both the ground and onboard solutions:

• Integration process — a custom installation script provisions either a main node or a worker node, setting up the platform and cluster with all required COTS solutions such as K3s, urunc, Argo Workflows and Helm.
• Safety and security validation — a dedicated plan to ensure ORCHIDE meets safety and security standards, validated through static and dynamic methods.
• Platform-specific aspects — development and validation of network and storage management for the demonstrators.
• Ground system development — the building blocks required to create unikernel applications, deploy and monitor them together with Mission Plans has been developed and integrated with the space components.

Alongside the technical work, we prepared the ORCHIDE User Manual to support the upcoming demonstration activities in WP5.

We are grateful to our Advisory Board for their guidance and look forward to showing ORCHIDE in action. Stay tuned for the demonstrations!

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.

Our team just wrapped up an exciting program increment meeting last week on May 22-23 for the ORCHIDE project. We met physically in Paris at the Tarides HQ. As part of the PI we had a presentation for our advisory board members showcasing the advancements for the ORCHIDE software and demonstrating different functionalities which are working in our current simulated environment.

This has been a key knowledge sharing experience, with workshops organized by partners designed to familiarize ourselves with each other's components. Based on the constructive and well-rounded feedback, we will be working for the remainder of this work package to improve the development outcomes and make them easier to integrate.

We are happy to report the successful completion of our third Milestone Review, the Detailed Design Review, held on 23 January 2025. After four planning iterations and thirteen delivered deliverables, this review marked the point where the ORCHIDE architecture moved from definition into concrete, detailed design.

During the meeting we walked our Advisory Board through the detailed design of the full ORCHIDE solution, covering both the ground and space systems:

• The framework detailed design, including the management framework and its mission, storage, execution and security managers, as well as the simulation framework.
• The orchestrator detailed design that coordinates applications across a heterogeneous, multi-node onboard data center.
• The simulator detailed design and the accompanying test plan.

As always, the constructive feedback from our Advisory Board will guide our work as we move from design towards integration. Thank you to everyone involved for the preparation and the insightful discussion!

We are excited to announce the successful completion of our latest Milestone Review, where the general architecture of our project was presented. This review marks a significant step in our development journey.

During the meeting, we have received invaluable feedback from our Advisory Board, whose expertise and guidance continue to shape our progress. Their constructive insights will be instrumental in refining our architecture and ensuring we meet our project goals with precision and innovation.

Thank you for your continued support as we work towards delivering cutting-edge solutions!

The first milestone meeting has taken place on 29 May 2024. It focused on the requirement review was a resounding success.

During the meeting, the project requirements were thoroughly reviewed and refined, ensuring they are comprehensive, clear, and aligned with project goals. Key stakeholders and the advisory board participated actively, contributing valuable insights and feedback that will undoubtedly strengthen the project foundation.

Highlights of the meeting include:

• Business impact
• Use cases and scenarios
• User requirements

Gratitude is extended to everyone for their preparation, collaboration, and constructive input.