Distributed clouds have been regarded as the key enabling technology to provide new trends of services. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we discuss current distributed clouds architecture and highlight the issues involved, specifically scalability. Second, we investigate the benefits of the use of the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) as a networking solution for the distributed clouds. Our proposal, called Scalable Forwarding with RINA (SFR), has been evaluated via simulations and showed to reduce the routing table size by around 75%. The paper concludes by highlighting the advantages of the RINA-based approach over current distributed clouds networking solutions in terms of scalability, simplicity and manageability