There's been some work over the last 4 or so years on producing cloud abstractions to enable a multi-cloud approach (effectively trying to provide a sensible AP

There's been some work over the last 4 or so years on producing cloud abstractions to enable a multi-cloud approach (effectively trying to provide a sensible API that can work independently of a particular cloud provider). Projects like OCCI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cloud_Computing_Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cloud_Computing_Interface have published documents on how this would look Personally my take is that the proposed abstractions are too low level to be of genuine use as an abstraction layer across cloud providers - but I'm biased in that I was involved in the research and development of a higher-level abstraction that provided something closer towards a PaaS approach - roughly equivalent to provisioning an instance (with disks and networking as required) and configuring it with puppet (this was back in in 2007 though). The general attitude I've got from cloud providers when I spoke to them is that small providers like the idea of standards (reduces barrier to picking up their service) and big providers have no motivation to allow such mobility or multi-cloud use.