- The variety of emerging cloud services and applications manifests in a multitude of network and hardware requirements, but also in different service and traffic characteristics. Due to the popularity of clouds, a set of issues emerges for the different stakeholders involved in providing and delivering cloud services to the end user. Not only pure network layer optimization, but especially the new field of socially-aware traffic management seems promising to overcome these issues. In this paper, the applicability of social awareness to different types of cloud services is discussed. For that purpose, cloud applications are classified according to relevant technical and non-technical characteristics. Based on this novel classification scheme, the benefits and challenges of social awareness are discussed and examples for the optimization of cloud services are given.
