11Distributed and Parallel Computing
a distributed system comprising a collection of interconnected and virtualized com-
puters. Participating computers are dynamically congured as one or more unied
computing resources based on service-level agreements (SLAs). SLAs, which include
QoS requirements, are agreements between customers and cloud providers. An SLA
species the specications, terms, and conditions of the service to be provided with
agreed upon metrics by all parties and penalties for violating the agreement(s).
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) denes cloud
computing as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, and on-demand network
access to a shared pool of congurable computing resources (e.g., netw ...