Chinese mythology is replete with deities that ride clouds up into the heavens. Many startups similarly seeking nirvana on the back of cloud infrastructure have found their ascent rudely interrupted.

It seems unlikely that any single cloud infrastructure provider can be entirely immune to outages. The massive scale of such operations is unprecedented, so statistically catastrophes are to be expected. And there’s the Dark Side of the web, already capable of taking out the internet infrastructure of a small country. By comparison, crippling a cloud provider for fun or profit should be a walk in the park.

While starving startups have few alternatives, businesses are likely to take a dim view of such unscheduled downtime. Of course, they could choose to maintain a duplicate copy of their systems on-premise, but that will really screw up the economic advantages of using cloud infrastructure in the first place.

But what if the duplicate copy lived at a second cloud provider, so if the first cloud provider went belly-up, the systems would automatically failover? Even better, how about an abstraction layer that knits together all cloud providers, so you can just deploy your systems to this “meta cloud” which would automatically distribute it across multiple cloud providers?

Well, we could wait years for cloud interoperability standards to (hopefully) emerge – kudos to Eucalyptus for starting the ball rolling. In the meantime, this feels very much like a wide open opportunity for aspiring cloud startups to step into.