Cloud computing is the latest trend in computing where the intention is to facilitate cheap, utility type computing resources in a service-oriented manner. However, the cloud landscape is still maturing and there are heterogeneities between the clouds, ranging from the application development paradigms to their service interfaces,and scaling approaches. These differences hinder the adoption of cloud by major enterprises. We believe that a cloud middleware can solve most of these issues to allow

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... cross-cloud inter-operation. Our proposed system is Al-tocumulus, a cloud middleware that homogenizes the clouds. In order to provide the best use of the cloud resources and make that use predictable and repeatable, Altocumulus is based on the concept of cloud best practices. In this paper we briefly describe the Altocumulus middleware and detail the cloud best practice model it encapsulates. We also present examples based on real world deployments as evidence to the applicability of our middleware.