The Blue-Cloud initiative, launched in 2019 under the EU's Horizon 2020 programme, set out to create a federated ecosystem for marine data and services within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The follow-up project, Blue-Cloud2026, is advancing this vision by transforming the initial pilot into a sustainable, scalable and operational European ecosystem that delivers FAIR data and analytical services for research on oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters.
At the core of this ecosystem is the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE), which provides an integrated user experience by federating distributed computing resources, analytical platforms and data services. Built on the D4Science [1, 2] infrastructure and gCube [3] technology, the VRE is accessible through the EOSC Blue-Cloud2026 Gateway and enables Virtual Laboratories (VLabs) that combine data access, processing and collaboration capabilities.
This deliverable describes the second release of the federated infrastructure, expanding the federation from initial integration of the Google Cloud Platform and EGI Cloud Compute resources to new federated resources and services, including the operational integration of SOCIB services for Science Knowledge Graphs (SKG), machine-actionable Data Management Plans (maDMPs) and FAIR assessment capabilities, and the deployment of Beacon technology as high-performance federated subsetting infrastructure enabling fast, parameter-level access to large volumes of heterogeneous marine data and supporting scalable data-lake configurations for WorkBench analytics.
These developments significantly enhance the VRE's ability to support data-intensive scientific workflows and demonstrate the maturity of the Blue-Cloud federation model. The federation architecture supports multiple implementation pathways to accommodate heterogeneous e- infrastructures while ensuring a consistent user experience. Overall, this second release demonstrates the operational consolidation and scalability of the Blue-Cloud VRE, extending federation from computing resources to data access, semantic interoperability and service-level integration. The results strengthen alignment with EOSC and ENVRI initiatives and provide a robust foundation for future expansion, long-term sustainability and broader adoption by the marine research community.