Clouds are on the way to replace traditional IT infrastructures for providing and consuming all sorts of services in research and commercial environments. As scope and complexity of both offerings and requirements increase technology is needed allowing to (automatically) optimise such Cloud environments in multiple dimensions, e.g. in terms of the infrastructure, management of trust, security and risk, service deployment and provisioning, guarantees for QoS, federation of clouds and reliable and efficient selection mechanisms for bursting into the Cloud.
