5th workshop on cloud computing.

The shared computing and communication infrastructure, known as cloud computing , is supporting a growing number of companies to drive their core businesses. The Cloud term characterizes the end-users perspective: it offers services the users access as outsiders (which could be in the form of a computing and communication platform or infrastructure or an application) while being agnostic about the technology underlying it. The implementation details are abstracted away, and the service/computing is consumed as a pay-per-use service and not acquired as an asset. From the service-provider's perspective, a number of technologies can be deployed to deliver the end-user experience. When the provider is outside of the end user's organization, it is called the public cloud or just the cloud. The same underlying technology can be used to provide similar infrastructure / platforms / software within the organization, perhaps offered by a separate business unit or to take advantage of the benefits while maintaining control; in this case, the term private cloud is used. Separate clouds (separated by technology or management or geography) unified to appear as one are termed federated clouds. When the federated clouds are running different technologies, and in particular do not natively expose same APIs, a more specialized term is a heterogeneous federated cloud. When the clouds being federated are composed of both private and public clouds, the result is a hybrid cloud. Cloud offerings are often classified into three main -as-a-Service (-aaS) categories: Infrastructure-,Platform-, and Software-. Other categories are sometimes used to describe specific implementations of these categories Storage-aaS, Management-aaS, etc.