A survey and taxonomy of infrastructure as a service and web hosting cloud providers

With an increasing number of providers claiming to offer Cloud infrastructures, there is a lack in the community for a common terminology, accompanied by a clear definition and classification of Cloud features. We conduct in this paper a survey on a selection of Cloud providers, and propose a taxonomy of eight important Cloud computing elements covering service type, resource deployment, hardware, runtime tuning, business model, middleware, and performance. We conclude that the provisioning of Service Level Agreements as utilities, of open and interoperable middleware solutions, as well as of sustained performance metrics for high-performance computing applications are three elements with the highest need of further community research.