Since “clouds” do not refer to a specific technology, but to a general provisioning paradigm with enhanced capabilities, it is mandatory to elaborate on these aspects. There is currently a strong tendency to regard clouds as “just a new name for an old idea”, which is mostly due to a confusion between the cloud concepts and the strongly related P/I/SaaS paradigms (see also II.A.2, but also due to the fact that similar aspects have already been addressed without the dedicated term “cloud” associated with it. This section specifies the concrete capabilities associated with clouds that are considered essential (required in any cloud environment) and relevant (ideally supported, but may be restricted to specific use cases). We can thereby distinguish non-functional, economic and technological capabilities addressed, respectively to be addressed by cloud systems. Non-functional aspects represent qualities or properties of a system, rather than specific technological requirements. Imp
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