The term &quot;federation&quot; has been overused, misused and abused. At it&#x27;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 <i>should</i> mean &quot;federated use of computer resources&quot; and extend the three primitives of the cloud to be used by all, at will:<p>1. Compute - allows the transformation of one type of data to another.<p>2. Storage - allows the storage of data.<p>3. Network - allows the transfer of data from compute to storage, or vice versa.<p>Federation&#x27;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 &quot;standardized trust&quot; to be applied, some type of identity to be associated with it, and some way of paying for the resources used.<p>One possible solution for implementing a Federated Cloud of Clouds is to use cryptocurrencies to pay for the processing of data, identify who&#x27;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&#x27;s intent to change how software is written.<p>BTW, I don&#x27;t consider &quot;standards&quot; 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 &quot;standard&quot; by the evidence it is unchanging, once created.<p>Federation will only occur once we&#x27;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.