Cloud elasticity is a unique feature of cloud environments, which allows for the on demand (de-)provisioning or reconfiguration of the resources of cloud deployments. The efficient handling of cloud elasticity is a challenge that attracts the interest of the research community. This work constitutes a survey of research efforts towards this direction. The main contribution of this work is an up-to-date review of the latest elasticity handling approaches and a detailed classification scheme,

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... sing on the elasticity decision making techniques. Finally, we discuss various research challenges and directions of further research, regarding all phases of cloud elasticity, which can be deemed as a special case of autonomic behavior of computing systems 3 .