A review of cloud computing for the NDVI Phillip G. Bradford [ 0000−0001−5628−8953] Abstract The NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) is an index for measuring vegetation. This article surveys selected cloud computation issues and solutions for computing NDVI. The focus is on serverless cloud computing. Met- rics, other than NDVI, are not discussed here. NDVI may be viewed as a proxy for computing these other metrics. Cloud computing plays a large role in providing virtualized systems and infrastructure. The cloud offers scalability and elasticity on a global scale. This allows efficient and effective periodic or intermittent computa- tion. Population change, eating habits, deforestation, biodiversity preservation, and climate all make measuring NDVI more important than ever. Fortunately, NDVI has become easier to compute due to the cloud, access to satellite data and sensors, global positioning systems, global mapping systems and increases in computational power and infrastructure. NDVI is interesting to the farming and fishing industries, government policy makers, and even investors. Using NDVI, independent farmers may leverage this information about their own work as well as their competitors. This means farmers may be able to change their focus based on projected global farming productivity. 1 Introduction Abstract Each chapter should be preceded by an abstract (no more than 200 words) that summarizes the content. The abstract will appear online at www.SpringerLink.com and be available with unrestricted access. This allows unregistered users to read the abstract as a teaser for the complete chapter. Please use the ’starred’ version of the abstract command for typesetting the text of the online abstracts (cf. source file of this chapter template abstract) and include them with the source files of your Phillip G. Bradford Department of Computer Science and Engineering,University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA. e-mail: phillip.bradford@uconn.edu 1