A Panorama of Cloud Services

Abstract

Cloud computing paradigm has attracted a lot of attention in the last five years as coming during an economic crisis with an appealing offer in reducing the infrastructure and maintenance costs. After first wave of enthusiasm in adopting the concept, a clearer image has been formed about the benefits and limitations of Cloud computing and a lot of different supporting technologies were developed. As consequence a new threat is raised by the high number of the proprietary technologies that makes difficult the decision of the proper technological selection according to the real business needs.
In this context the aim of this paper is to offer a snapshot on the current concepts and the available technologies, especially of the ones that can allow the development of a solid market of Cloud services and applications. A particular attention is given to the trend of federating and brokering Cloud services in the process of forming new markets. Moreover, we propose a classification of groups of services from multiple Clouds based on models similar to the ones used in computer graphics to express colors. Furthermore, a technological solution aligned to the market requirements is presented as case study, pointing also to the role of open-source codes for promoting the Cloud service usage on large scale.