1. Introduction Cloud computing promises a new way of provisioning elastic computational resources and software applications by enabling people to have timely access to resources and services with reasonable cost, guaranteed SLA, reduced entry effort and investment. This vision is attractive to research and educational groups in many developing countries where even big academic and research institutions are still lacking resources (and funding for acquiring resources) to sufficiently support their research and education activities. For research and educational groups without adequate computing resources, cloud computing offerings could be a viable solution. However, for their research and teaching activities these groups face not only with common issues in accessing large computational resources and having short time research plans, but also several other constraints in terms of technological infrastructure (e.g., network performance), educational objectives (e.g., mastering advanced technologies developed in developed countries) and economy (e.g., lack of money even for a short research plan).