Data and tools to realize the data value chain are enablers of digital transformation in all sectors of the economy and society, boosting economic development, increasing the ability to tackle societal challenges and excel in science. To realize this, collaboration, across business sectors, scientific domains and organizational boundaries, countries and continents, is widely seen as essential to innovation, productivity and discovery. Federation of data and services coupled with interoperability frameworks for compliance to federation-level policies, technical standards and service delivery processes, have been successfully adopted in many domains. This paper compares governance, architectures and models of federation for cloud-based data exploitation focusing on two use cases: the European Open Science Cloud and GAIA-X, the Federated Data Infrastructure for Europe.