Cloud Computing and Service Level Management: an investigation on the state of art

2 1 Introduction In the IT world recently emerged a new buzzword called Cloud Computing, characterized by several definitions and different viewpoints. The birth of the term Cloud Computing is related to the common stereotype representing the data transport across carrier backbones to an endpoint on the other side of the cloud. Figure 1 - Classical network diagram The first signs of these concepts date back to 1961, when John McCarthy 1 , a well- known authority in artificial intelligence, expressed his vision of the future, where computing power and even specific applications might be sold through a utility-type business model. This vision was revived in 1969 by J.C.R. Licklider 2 , with his vision of a wide computer network where people would be globally connected. By the mid-70s this idea faded away when it became clear that the IT-related technologies of the time were unable to sustain this futuristic computing model. However, with the new millennium, the concept has once again been revived and the term “Cloud Computing” began to emerge in technology circles (Rittinghouse and Ransome 2009, Hoefer and Karagiannis 2010, Wilson 2009, IDC 2011). 1 John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts), is an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language. 2 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J.C.R. or "Lick" was an American computer scientist, considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history. He is particularly remembered as an Internet pioneer, with an early vision of a world-wide computer network long before it was built.