Elasticity itself is influenced by these adaptation processes as well as by other factors such as the underlying hardware, the virtualization technology, or the cloud management software. These factors vary across providers and often remain unknown to the cloud customer. Even if they are known, the effect of specific configurations on the performance of an application is hard to quantify and compare. Furthermore, the available adaptation processes are quite different in their methods and complexity as shown in the surveys by Lorido-Botran et al. [2], Galante et al. [3] and of Jennings and Stadler [4].