In preparation to this new scenario, many hardware and software companies are investing to create new platforms able to attract customers on the clouds. Cloud platforms provide services to create applications in competition or in alternative to on-premises platforms, the traditional platforms based on an operating system as a foundation, on a group of infrastructure services and on a set of packaged and cus- tom applications. The crucial difference between the two platforms is that, while on-premises platforms are designed to support consumer-scale or enterprise-scale applications, cloud platforms can potentially support multiple users at a wider scale, namely at Internet scale. Cloud computing has been seen as a step.
