A terminology to classify artifacts for cloud infrastructure

Cloud environments are widely used to offer scalable software services. To support these environments, organizations operating data centers must maintain an infrastructure with a significant amount of resources. Such resources are managed by specific software to ensure service level agreements based on one or more performance metrics. Within such infrastructure, approaches to meet non-functional requirements can be split into various artifacts, distributed across different operational layers, which operate together with the aim of reaching a specific target. Existing studies classify such approaches using different terms, which usually are used with conflicting meanings by different people. Therefore, it is necessary a common nomenclature defining different artifacts, so they can be organized in a more scientific way. To this end, we propose a comprehensive bottom-up classification to identify and classify approaches for system artifacts at the infrastructure level, and organize existing literature using the proposed classification.