Cloud Computing Services: Taxonomy of Discovery Approaches and Extraction Solutions

Abstract

Cloud computing offers new features of sharing resources and applications to meet users’ computing requirements. It is a model by which the users can access computing resources as services offered on the Internet (cloud services). Cloud service providers offer a highly diverse range of asymmetric cloud services with heterogeneous features, which makes it difficult for the users to find the best service that fits his needs. Many research studies have been done on cloud service discovery, and several models and solutions that applied different techniques have been proposed. This paper aims at presenting the state of the art in the area of cloud services discovery by exploring the current approaches, techniques, and models. Furthermore, it proposes a taxonomy of cloud service discovery approaches. An integrative review approach was used to explore the related literature. Then, by analyzing the existing cloud service discovery solutions, a taxonomy of discovery approaches was suggested based on several perspectives including the discovery environment and the discovery process methods. The proposed taxonomy allows easily classifying and comparing cloud services discovery solutions. Moreover, it may reveal issues and gaps for further research and expose new insights for more innovative and effective cloud services discovery solutions.