The term "federation" has been overused, misused and abused. At it's base layer, Federation can be thought of as process that unifies things and the people usin

The term "federation" has been overused, misused and abused. At it's base layer, Federation can be thought of as process that unifies things and the people using the things in a way that is reproducible at a future date. Within the context of the Internet and Software (the cloud), Federation should mean "federated use of computer resources" and extend the three primitives of the cloud to be used by all, at will: 1. Compute - allows the transformation of one type of data to another. 2. Storage - allows the storage of data. 3. Network - allows the transfer of data from compute to storage, or vice versa. Federation's historic constituents have been standards, payments and identity. In order for cloud federation to be viable, the primitives above must be able to be used in a way that allows some type of "standardized trust" to be applied, some type of identity to be associated with it, and some way of paying for the resources used. One possible solution for implementing a Federated Cloud of Clouds is to use cryptocurrencies to pay for the processing of data, identify who's data it might be, and then encapsulate the data being federated into some type of standard. I have explored a generalized solution for this and have presented it to a few peers. It seems doable, if we can mobilize the development community's intent to change how software is written. BTW, I don't consider "standards" to be anything other than a light consensus mechanism applied to a set of data which is then made immutable. One might consider a blockchain a "standard" by the evidence it is unchanging, once created. Federation will only occur once we've moved infrastructure to using cryptocurrencies for deployments. It will also require a radical shift in the way we think about how software is written and paid for.