Resource provisioning with budget constraints for adaptive applications in cloud environments

Utility computing was a vision stated more than 40 years ago. It refers to the idea that computing resources and services can be delivered, utilized, and paid for as utilities such as water or electricity. The recent emergence of cloud computing is making this vision realizable. Examples of efforts in this area include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers like Amazon EC2 and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers like Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure. More recently, there is a growing interest in the use of cloud computing for scientific computing, as evidenced by a large-scale funded project like Magellan, and new workshops.