[microcolonel]

I still don't see why they have to be tied to a single provider. Seems like a major weakness of large customers in this space, that they're unwilling to demand standards or protect themselves from exploitation in this way. Obviously there will be new APIs for services which are not yet a commodity, but there are some highly standardized offerings from every major "cloud" vendor which should be configurable in roughly the same way; many of them even have similar limitations, like AWS and Azure (last I tried) not having the option to expose their VPSes directly over IPv6.