An Association is a collection of IoT devices, multilayer edge resources and federated cloud platforms that dynamically and autonomously cooperate via a sophisticated coordination framework. EMPYREAN’s Associations operation will be empowered by a cognitive platform that involves distributed algorithms, decentralized AI-enabled decision-making and autonomous adaptations. An EMPYREAN Association will constitute a secure and trusted execution environment (island) for IoT devices and edge resources that may belong to different organizations, and data belonging to ML-workloads and (hyper-distributed) applications. Associations will also be coupled with identity and access management mechanisms to assure controlled access and confidentiality of data. EMPYREAN will develop an S3- compatible distributed secure storage service operating autonomously inside an Association when needed, but also in the continuum. What is more, EMPYREAN will provide a decentralized and distributed interconnection and data distribution service that supports decentralized data distribution, enabling services and data to interconnect seamlessly. Communication mechanisms will be developed for direct message and data transfer, using an FPGA-based RDMA device driver that drastically improves small-message transfer performance.