Classification and Positioning of Cloud Definitions and Use Case Scenarios for Portability and Interoperability

Cloud Computing has rapidly evolved and spread in the past few years, with always new services and functionalities being offered by providers in order to gain larger market sectors. This has caused in many cases a lot of distress and confusion to customers who have been often subjected to the "vendor lock-in" phenomenon, because of interoperability and portability issues often arising among different Cloud providers. In this paper we provide a brief introduction to the basic definitions of Cloud Computing, portability and interoperability and we also describe a set of established use cases. All these notions are mapped to a multi-dimensional space, which is used to classify both definitions and use cases. The focus here is represented by portability and interoperability features.