We have observed a growing interest in demand for heterogeneous compute and storage resources, distributed across various geographical locations, working togeth-er in a federated manner. A unified platform like NOUS can enhance accessibility, offer greater elasticity, reduce response times, and optimize the use of these under-lying resources. We examine current trends from both the perspective of infrastruc-ture providers and end users, with a particular focus on cloud infrastructures that include high-performance computing (HPC) as a key resource. Through a detailed analysis of selected aspects of Cloud-HPC interoperability and similar federated infrastructure setups, several research and innovation challenges are identified, and recommendations and guidelines for the NOUS platform are defined.