A growing interest in moving software applications, services, and even infrastructure resources from in-house premises to external providers has been witnessed recently. A survey conducted by F5 Networks between June and July 2009 1 showed that such a trend has now reached a critical mass; and an increasing number of IT managers have already adopted, or are considering adopting, this approach to implement IT operations. This model of making IT resources available, known as Cloud Computing [1], opens new opportunities to small, medium-sized, and large companies. It is not necessary anymore to bear considerable costs for maintaining the IT infrastructures or to plan for peak demand. Instead, infrastructure and applications can scale elastically according to the business needs at a reasonable price. The possibility of instantly reacting to the demand of customers without long-term planning is one of the most appealing features of cloud computing, and it has been a key factor in making this trend popular among technology and business practitioners.As a result of this growing interest, the major players in the IT industry such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Sun, and Yahoo have started offering cloudcomputing-based solutions that cover the entire IT computing stack, from hardware to applications and services. These offerings have become quickly
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