Guest Editor’s Introduction: Special Issue on Cloud Computing Orchestration

Cloud computing has provided users with access to computing, storage and network resources with unprecedented flexibility both from public Cloud providers and on-premises Cloud infrastructures. Cloud computing features several characteristics that explain its growth and popularity in the last decade. Maybe the most salient ones are flexibility, pay-peruse, and elasticity. The usage of Cloud technologies enables the software requirements to be defined by the user rather than by the infrastructure provider. This is an important point to ease the migration of scientific applications into the cloud. However, the resources have to be properly orchestrated (i.e., provisioned, configured and delivered) for users to leverage the benefits of these elastic infrastructures within their application domains. Complex application topologies, involving multiple Virtual Machines and multiple components with diverse software and configuration dependencies strongly benefit from the advances in orchestration.