Cloud Architectures , Networks , Services , and Management

With the wide availability of high-bandwidth, low-latency network connectivity, the Internet has enabled the delivery of rich services such as social networking, content delivery, and e-commerce at unprecedented scales. This technological trend has led to the development of cloud computing, a paradigm that harnesses the massive capacities of data centers to support the delivery of online services in a cost-effective manner. In a cloud computing environment, the traditional role of service providers is divided into two: cloud providers who own the physical data center and lease resources (e.g., virtual machines or VMs) to service providers; and service providers who use resources leased by cloud providers to execute applications. By leveraging the economies-of-scale of data centers, cloud computing can provide significant reduction in operational expenditure. At the same time, it also supports new applications such as big-data analytics (e.g., MapReduce [1]) that process massive volumes of data in a scalable and efficient fashion. The rise of cloud computing has made a profound impact on the development of the IT industry in recent years. While large companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook,