Foreword: Quality in cloud computing

Summary form only given. Public Cloud providers encourage proprietary lock-in; the internal Cloud architectures are not yet mature; the utilisation of a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) paradigm in a Cloud environment is not fully worked out with many variants and appropriate programming languages providing declarative specification of intent while allowing subtle control of dynamic resource allocation are lacking. Above all there is the challenge of quality: quality of the service provision (quality of service, service level agreement management); quality in modelling business requirements in a Cloud environment; quality in the languages used to express those requirements and to execute them; quality in the services in both what they provide and how they provide it; quality in service composition including dynamicity; quality in scheduling execution including partitioning and parallelism; quality in monitoring execution and triggering actions to maintain quality of service. There is also the quality of business continuity provision and the quality of virtualisation - including seamless execution transfers to assure timeliness and the quality of the Cloud infrastructure and platform provision in terms of "green ICT." Unlike other areas of ICT there is not yet for Clouds a quality of conformance since there is no agreed standard (unlike, for example, WWW).