The development of cloud computing has advanced rapidly over the past few years. Benefiting from the dynamic characteristics of cloud computing, enterprises can purchase cloud services based on different aspects in order to save operating expenses. Many companies have seen the opportunities and changes in either cloud service providers or cloud service consumers. For the latter, with so many cl...

Establishing trust is one of the most challenging issues in emerging cloud computing area. It is becoming increasingly complex for cloud users to make distinction (with respect to trustworthiness) among service providers offering similar kinds of services. There must be some mechanisms in the hands of users to determine trustworthiness of service providers so that they can select service provid...

As the number of users of cloud services increase all over the world, cloud service providers keep deploying geographically distributed data centers more. Since resource capacity of a data center is limited, cloud service providers need to distribute load to data centers. However, when the provider distributes load, SLAs (service level agreements) established with consumers should be guaranteed...

Cloud computing is currently emerging as an ever-changing, growing paradigm that models "everything-as-a-service." Virtualised physical resources, infrastructure, and applications are supplied by service provisioning in the cloud. The evolution in the adoption of cloud computing is driven by clear and distinct promising features for both cloud users and cloud providers. However, the increasing ...

Computing in the cloud is becoming more common as companies migrate their applications into cloud computing platforms to reduce maintenance costs and increase availability. Cloud hosting platforms, such as Amazon’s EC2, provide a virtual hosting environment that is easy for a service provider to provision in response to dynamically changing demands. This model lowers the barrier to entry for in...

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 servic...

As cloud computing becomes widely deployed, more and more cloud services are 8 offered to end users in a pay-as-you-go manner. Today’s increasing number of end user-oriented 9 cloud services are generally operated by SaaS (Software as a Service) providers using rental 10 virtual resources from third-party infrastructure vendors. As far as SaaS providers are concerned, 11 how to process the dyna...

Cloud computing needs end-user customisation and personalisation of multi-tenant cloud service offerings. Particularly, QoS and governance policy management and monitoring is needed. We propose a user-customisable policy definition solution that can be enforced in multitenant cloud offerings through automated instrumentation and monitoring. Service processes run by cloud and SaaS providers can ...

The management of today’s service level agreements on the cloud market is often nontransparent and inefficient for the customer and the provider. However, service level agreements are crucial for establishing trust between all participants, especially for companies whose success depends on the purchased cloud service with its appropriated service quality. This thesis aims to improve the current...