As cloud computing adoption and deployment increase, the performance evaluation of the cloud environments is becoming very important. Cloud applications have different composition, configuration, and deployment requirements. Simulation and modeling techniques are suitable to quantify the performance of resource allocation policies and application scheduling algorithms in Cloud computing environments for different application and service models according to different work loads, energy performance and system size. In this paper, we give an overview of the existing distributed systems simulation and modeling tools in order to outline the main characteristics and peculiarities. We then present an outlook on new requirements to be addressed for performance evaluation of cloud applications through simulation and modeling.