Had a great conversation today regarding the need for metering, chargeback, and billing of cloud computing resources. The person I spoken with at a Fortune 1000 company increased the scope and magnitude of the issue of billing for cloud computing resources beyond what I had previously considered. I believed that doing any type of chargeback and billing for one public, private or hybrid installation was difficult. This person pointed out that the problem is even bigger in scope. The reality is many companies are using multiple public cloud vendors and have many different private cloud data centers. A customer may use AWS for some smaller public cloud applications, Salesforce.com (SaaS), Rackspace for IaaS, Savvis for colocation and a variety of Iaas and PaaS implementations for the private cloud. How does a company get a consolidated bill for all these different cloud environments? I am not sure their is an answer right now.