Clouds at the crossroads: research perspectives

Despite its promise, most cloud computing innovations have been almost exclusively driven by a few industry leaders, such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and IBM. The involvement of a wider research community, both in academia and industrial labs, has so far been patchy without a clear agenda. In our opinion, the limited participation stems from the prevalent view that clouds are mostly an engineering and business-oriented phenomenon based on stitching together existing technologies and tools.