ABSTRACT
Clouds are emerging as the consolidated, virtualized, automated, and shared IT environment for e®ciently hosting, managing, and delivering scores of service-centric and enterprise-scale applications, platforms, and infrastructures as services to worldwide users through the pervasive and public Internet, which is being touted as a cheap communication infrastructure. In other words, as the knowledge-driven service era sets in and stabilizes, the utility and ubiquity of the cloud as the pathbreaking service deployment and delivery container will increase further.
