Towards a Taxonomy for Cloud Computing from an e-Science Perspective

In the last few years, cloud computing has emerged as a computational paradigm that enables scientists to build more complex scientific applications to manage large data sets or high-performance applications, based on distributed resources. By following this paradigm, scientists may use distributed resources (infrastructure, storage, databases, and applications) without having to deal with implementation or configuration details. In fact, there are many cloud computing environments already available for use. Despite its fast growth and adoption, the definition of cloud computing is not a consensus. This makes it very difficult to comprehend the cloud computing field as a whole, correlate, classify, and compare the various existing proposals. Over the years, taxonomy techniques have been used to create models that allow for the classification of concepts within a domain. The main objective of this chapter is to apply taxonomy techniques in the cloud computing domain. This chapter discusses many aspects involved with cloud computing that are important from a scientific perspective. It contributes by proposing a taxonomy based on characteristics that are fundamental for scientific applications typically associated with the cloud paradigm.