The emergence of the phenomenon commonly known as cloud computing represents a fundamental change in the way information technology (IT) services are invented, developed, deployed, scaled, updated, maintained and paid for. Computing as we know today reflects a paradox — on one hand, computers continue to become exponentially more powerful and the per-unit cost of computing continues to fall rapidly, so much so that computing power per se is nowadays considered to be largely a commodity [24,32]. On the other hand, as computing becomes more pervasive within the