Cloud computing is dramatically shaping modern IT infrastructure. It virtualizes computing resources, provides elastic scalability, serves as a pay-as-you-use utility, simplifies the IT administrators' daily tasks, enhances the mobility and collaboration of data, and increases user productivity. We focus on providing generalized black-box methodologies and benchmarks for quantifying the foundational technological building blocks of cloud computing. First, we quantified the performance isolation properties of virtualization implementations to understand the impact that one misbehaving virtual machine can have on other well-behaving VMs on the same host. This is an essential question for organizations to move their services into the cloud. Second, live migration, or moving a running VM from one host to another without service interruption, is a critical feature of many virtualization platforms, but all VM migrations are not created equal. We measured important performance characteristics of live migration in different virtualization systems, in order to provide important data to guide the migration decisions of both IT administrators and cloud developers. Third, cloud storage is the twin sister of cloud computing. Cloud storage offers protection against a whole class of catastrophic risks that an on-site backup solution cannot. We compared current popular consumer cloud storage offerings and derived a set of lessons and recommendations for consumer cloud storage vendors. From those measurements, we have developed a systematic black-box methodology for quantifying the performance characteristics across different cloud platforms. We implemented a series of benchmarks that enabled apples-to-apples comparisons of general virtualization systems and cloud storage. In this dissertation, we describe our methodology and present the results of running the benchmarks that we have developed for quantifying those critical cloud technologies. We further discuss the complications of quantifying cloud services and our experiences dealing with various cloud platforms. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]