Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Issue on Green and Energy-Efficient Cloud Computing: Part I

The papers in this special section focus on green and energy efficient cloud computing. Cloud computing has had a huge commercial impact and has attracted the interest of the research community. Public clouds allow their customers to outsource the management of physical resources, and rent a variable amount of resources in accordance to their specific needs. Private clouds allow companies to manage on-premises resources, exploiting the capabilities offered by the cloud technologies, such as using virtualization to improve resource utilization and cloud software for resource management automation. Hybrid clouds, where private infrastructures are integrated and complemented by external resources, are becoming a common scenario as well, for example to manage load peaks. © 2013 IEEE.