Abstract: A method and system for optimizing placement of a plurality of software components of cloud services in a cloud computing network, generates a service deployment model with a placement optimization description described as constrained optimization problem, by matching service constraints to infrastructure capacity in combination with optimization criterium, thus enable the method and system to deploy new services and/or redeploy existing services in a profitable, efficient and flexible way.

Abstract: In a system having a master device coupled to a slave device by means of an interface, wherein a function of the master device includes downloading a control program to the slave device, an apparatus for providing the master device with capability information corresponding to the slave device has hardware for reading the capability information from a predefined portion of the control program, and hardware for storing the capability information for use by the master device during a communications operation with the slave device. An encoding scheme for the capability information permits new functions to be added without having to re-encode pre-existing information corresponding to pre-existing slave devices. The capability information is encoded as a first vector and a second vector. A new function that is supported by a new slave device is added to the first vector when the new function is not supported by any pre-existing slave device.