Scalability Issues and Research Challenges in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing emerges as one of the hottest topic in the field of Information Technology. It is a new paradigm for delivery of applications, platforms or computing resources to customers in a "pay-as-you-go-model" like any other services in a real life situation. It is attractive to business owners as it eliminates the requirement for users to plan ahead for provisioning. Because of this feature, enterprises and business owners prefer to go for cloud environment instead of investing on their own infrastructure. However, though cloud computing offers huge opportunities to the IT industry, the development of cloud computing technology is currently at its infancy, with many issues and challenges still to be addressed. One of the distinguishing characteristics of cloud computing is the ability to scale computing resources to match customers' demand. In this paper, a survey of cloud computing is presented, highlighting some of its issues and challenges and important concepts of scalability. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the immediate concerns that need to be taken care for a better scalable cloud environment.