Hacker News Reader

What would be great is an auth and billing abstraction layer so that a customer could buy services from multiple providers on the same account.

View on HN

Yes, all cloud brokerage attempts have so far stuck to the resources and avoided trying to do any unified billing. Its really tough to accomplish.

Can you think of other areas where competing services have common open billing? Great for sure but difficult commercially. Especially when you start bringing in credit risk and other non-technical factors.

I agree that this is difficult. I wasn't really thinking about competing providers though; more like complementary. Like getting IaaS from one company, CDN from another, DNS from another, etc. One could imagine a federation of pure-play service providers that might be able to compete against the more integrated cloud juggernauts while each company focused on one thing.

That would be excellent not just for IaaS but also PaaS services.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com