Cloud Brokerage: A Systematic Survey

Background—The proliferation of cloud services has opened a space for cloud brokerage services. Brokers intermediate between cloud customers and providers to assist the customer in selecting the most suitable service, helping to manage the dimensionality, heterogeneity, and uncertainty associated with cloud services. Objective—Unlike other surveys, this survey focuses on the customer perspective. The survey systematically analyses the literature to identify and classify approaches to realise cloud brokerage, presenting an understanding of the state-of-the-art and a novel taxonomy to characterise cloud brokers. Method—A systematic literature survey was conducted to compile studies related to cloud brokerage and explore how cloud brokers are engineered. These studies are then analysed from multiple perspectives, such as motivation, functionality, engineering approach, and evaluation methodology. Results—The survey resulted in a knowledge base of current proposals for realising cloud brokers. The survey identified differences between the studies’ implementations, with engineering efforts directed at combinations of market-based solutions, middlewares, toolkits, algorithms, semantic frameworks, and conceptual frameworks. Conclusion—Our comprehensive meta-analysis shows that cloud brokerage is still a formative field. Although significant progress has been achieved in this field, considerable challenges remain to be addressed, which are also identified in this survey.