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