SLICES is the outcome of our experience in the design, deployment, and operation of several test platforms such as Planet-lab Europe or the EU FIRE testbeds since 2005. This convinced us to put a proposal named SILECS to the ESFRI call of 2017 as a response to the scientific challenges ahead, the demand of the research community as well as the competition with the US and China. SLICES is the outcome of intense work carried out by our research community integrating the lessons learned with SILECS. A design phase will be achieved (2017 to 2022). Our INFRADEV-01 H2020 proposal has been accepted to support the Design phase. In the rest of the proposal the Design Phase refers to the period 2017-2022. A preparation phase (2022-2025) phase, supported by HORIZON-INFRA-2021-DEV-02-01, is currently investigation all issues related to sustainability, including the set up of the legal structure (ERIC) and financial frameworks and enable both deployment (2026) and full-operation (2029 on). A partial service will be made available as early as in 2025 based on existing infrastructures and a continuous integration and deployment methodology. The ICT domain contributes significantly to the European economy with a market size of about €600 billion and a fully functional Digital single market could contribute €415 billion per year to the European economic growth, boosting jobs, competition, investment and innovation in the EU. It is fundamental for the success of European digital services that ICT contributors act together. One of the driving motivations of SLICES-RI is the support and development of new technologies, services, and practices for the Next Generation Internet encompassing communication, networking, data-management and data-intelligence issues and help bring them to market for the benefit of Europe at different levels (economic, industrial, research, societal, education). To reach these objectives, SLICES-RI 1) defines a long-term strategy and vision for the research in the European and International ecosystems, connecting with other Research Infrastructures (eg SKA, SoBigData, HL-LHC) from other domains to leverage the synergy of them. SLICES ; 2) Secures the delivery of a number of readily-available Services according to FAIR principles and integration with the EOSC federated data infrastructure; 3) Performs a series of actions to support stakeholders at every stage of the research and innovation cycle, e.g., from researchers in public and private institutions, small and large business enterprises, and to the public sectors; 4) Strengthens the competitiveness of the digital ecosystem and socio-economic impact; 5) Provides training material and support, and 6) Contributes to standardisation of specifications and regulations.

SLICES-RI will provide access to a large variety of hardware together with a palet of different softwares and OS and monitoring tools in order to enable experimentation on every aspect of the data lifecycle within the large continuum from IoT/5G/edge/cloud.