Delivering cloud services with QoS requirements: Business opportunities, architectural solutions and energy-saving aspects

The flexible and pay-as-you-go computing capabilities offered by Cloud infrastructures are nowadays very attractive, and widely adopted by many organizations and enterprises. In particular this is true for those having periodical or variable tasks to execute, and, choose to not or cannot afford the expenses of buying and managing computing facilities or software packages, that should remain underutilized for most of the time. For their ability to couple the scalability offered by public service providers, with the wider Quality of Service (QoS) provisions and ad-hoc customizations provided by private Clouds, Hybrid Clouds (HC) seem a particularly appealing solution for customers requiring something more than the mere availability of the service.