How would you ensure service portability between Google App Engine (runs software, no access to the OS), AWS (Linux VMs) and Azure (Windows VMs)?
But portability between, AWS, Google Compute, Azure, Rackspace, Softlayer, Nephoscale, Linode, Digital Ocean, etc would be quite beneficial.
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.
Yeah, what vagrant has been able to acomplish so far is an example of this. There are many features that only work on some providers, usually just VirtualBox, and the AWS support is largely limited to controlling instances (vs configuring them).
I think it'll get there eventually, but there's not a lot of motivation/incentive from the established players.
Come on HN, let's help the EU. Anyone got any great ideas? Because I don't even understand the question, much less what the answer would be.
Edit: notice how everyone is just "assuming" what they mean. The problem is not well defined.