We (as in the industry) talk a lot about federating cloud. Usually solutions for federating cloud (aka hybrid cloud) are presented from the perspective of the end-user. We want to make it easier to transition between applications in the cloud and focus on identity management, single-sign on, and transparent integration that seamlessly directs users to the best resource, regardless of its deployment location.
But what about federation of the actual infrastructure? The architectures that support such ease of use features and functions for end-users should also be transparent and seamless and integrated. The disparity at the management layer between private cloud and traditional data center and public cloud is definitely a source of frustration for operations. Devops are code-switching between Amazon APIs, VMware vCloud solutions, and their own cloud management scripts and toolsets. Such disconnected processes result in inconsistent policies and a lack of holistic visibility into the performance and availability of applications that span environments. Ultimately, it negates the gains in deployment agility by introducing new overhead in management.