Skip to main content
Journal of Internet Services and Applications
Download PDF
  • SI: Future Net Service Models & Designs
  • Open access
  • Published:

Cloud computing services: taxonomy and comparison

Journal of Internet Services and Applications volume 2, pages 81–94 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

Cloud computing is a highly discussed topic in the technical and economic world, and many of the big players of the software industry have entered the development of cloud services. Several companies what to explore the possibilities and benefits of incorporating such cloud computing services in their business, as well as the possibilities to offer own cloud services. However, with the amount of cloud computing services increasing quickly, the need for a taxonomy framework rises. This paper examines the available cloud computing services and identifies and explains their main characteristics. Next, this paper organizes these characteristics and proposes a tree-structured taxonomy. This taxonomy allows quick classifications of the different cloud computing services and makes it easier to compare them. Based on existing taxonomies, this taxonomy provides more detailed characteristics and hierarchies. Additionally, the taxonomy offers a common terminology and baseline information for easy communication. Finally, the taxonomy is explained and verified using existing cloud services as examples.

References

  1. ABI Research. Mobile cloud computing—next generation browsers, Widgets, SIM, Network-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service. http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1003385-Mobile+Cloud+Computing. Visited: 2010, May 31

  2. Amazon Web Services. http://aws.amazon.com

  3. Amazon Web Services LLC. Amazon EC2 SLA. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla. Visited: 2010, May 8

  4. Appian Anywhere. http://www.appian.com/bpm-saas.jsp

  5. Armbrust M, Fox A, Griffith R, Joseph AD, Katz RH, Konwinski A, Lee G, Patterson DA, Rabkin A, Stoica I, Zaharia M Above the clouds: a Berkeley view of cloud computing. Tech Rep UCB/EECS-2009-28, EECS Dept, Uni of California, Berkeley (’09)

  6. Bernstein D, Ludvigson E, Sankar K, Diamond S, Morrow M (2009) Blueprint for the intercloud—protocols and formats for cloud computing interoperability. In: 2009 fourth international conference on Internet and web applications and services, p 328. doi:10.1109/ICIW.2009.55

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Box.net. http://box.net

  8. Brebner P, Liu A (2011) Performance and cost assessment of cloud services. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-19394-1_5

  9. Bungee Labs. http://www.bungeeconnect.com

  10. Buyya R, Yeo CS, Venugopal S, Broberg J, Brandic I (2009) Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the 5th utility. Future Gener Comput Syst 25(6):599–616

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Buyya R, Ranjan R, Calheiros RN (2010) Intercloud: Utility-oriented federation of cloud computing environments for scaling of application services. In: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on algorithms and architectures for parallel processing (ICA3PP 2010). Springer, Berlin, pp 21–23. doi:10.1.1.180.8754

    Google Scholar 

  12. CCIF. http://cloudforum.org

  13. Celesti A, Tusa F, Villari M, Puliafito A (2010) How to enhance cloud architectures to enable cross-federation. In: 2010 IEEE 3rd international conference on cloud computing, p 337. doi:10.1109/CLOUD.2010.46

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Citrix Systems, Inc. Xen hypervisor. http://www.xen.org

  15. Cloud Security Alliance (2009) Security best practices for cloud computing. https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/

  16. Cloud-Standards.org. http://cloud-standards.org

  17. DMTF (2010) Open virtualization format specification. http://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0243_1.0.0.pdf. Distributed management task force

  18. DMTF Cloud Computing Incubator. http://www.dmtf.org/about/cloud-incubator

  19. Edwards C (2009) The Tech Beat: games in the cloud? http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeatarchives/2009/02/games%_in_the_cl.html(2009. Business Week). Visited: 2010, Apr 28

  20. Eucalyptus. http://open.eucalyptus.com

  21. European Parliament. Council of Oct. 1995: Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (1995). http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31995L0046:EN:NOT

  22. European Parliament. Council of July 2002: Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector (2002). http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32002L0058:EN:NOT

  23. Force.com. http://force.com

  24. GigaSpaces.com. http://www.gigaspaces.com

  25. GoGrid. http://www.gogrid.com

  26. Google App Engine. http://appengine.google.com

  27. Google Apps. http://www.google.com/apps

  28. Grossman R (2009) The case for cloud computing. IT Prof 11(2):23–27

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. GroundWork. http://www.groundworkopensource.com

  30. Herrick DR (2009) Google this!: using Google Apps for collaboration and productivity. In: SIGUCCS’09: proceedings of the ACM SIGUCCS fall conference on user services conference. ACM, New York, pp 55–64

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  31. Hilley D (2009) Cloud computing: a taxonomy of platform and infrastructure-level offerings. Tech Rep GIT-CERCS-09-13, CERCS, Georgia Institute of Technology

  32. Hoefer CN, Karagiannis G (2010) Taxonomy of cloud computing services. In: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE workshop on enabling the future service-oriented Internet (EFSOI’10), Workshop of IEEE GLOBECOM 2010, pp 1345–1350

    Google Scholar 

  33. Huang Y, Su H, Sun W, Zhang JM, Guo CJ, Xu JM, Jiang ZB, Yang SX, Zhu J (2010) Framework for building a low-cost, scalable, and secured platform for web-delivered business services. IBM J Res Dev 54(6):535–548. doi:10.1147/JRD.2010.2065891

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. IBM Cloud Computing. http://ibm.com/ibm/cloud

  35. Intel Labs Berkeley. Clone cloud. http://berkeley.intel-research.net/bgchun/clonecloud. Visited: 2010, May 31

  36. Jowitt T (2009) Four out of five enterprises giving cloud a try. http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/it-business/services-sourcing/news/index.cfm?newsId=16355(Computerworld, UK). Visited: 2010, May 7

  37. Li H, Spence C, Armstrong R, Godfrey R, Schneider R, Smith J, White R (2010) Intel cloud computing taxonomy and ecosystem analysis. IT-Intel Brief (Cloud Computing)

  38. Li A, Yang X, Kandula S, Zhang M (2011) Comparing public-cloud providers. IEEE Internet Comput 15(2):50. doi:10.1109/MIC.2011.36

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Lin G, Fu D, Zhu J, Dasmalchi G (2009) Cloud computing: IT as a service. IT Prof 11(2):10–13

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Mell P, Grance T (2009) The NIST definition of cloud computing (v15). Tech Rep, National Institute of Standards and Technology

  41. Microsoft Azure. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure. Visited: 2010, May 14

  42. Mims C (2009) Technology review: sending cell phones into the cloud. http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22571/. Visited: 2010, May 31

  43. Murray P (2009) Enterprise grade cloud computing. In: WDDM’09: proceedings of the third workshop on dependable distributed data management. ACM, New York, pp 1–1

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  44. Nirvanix. http://www.nirvanix.com

  45. Oberle K, Fisher M (2010) Etsi cloud—initial standardization requirements for cloud services. In: Altmann J, Rana O (eds) Economics of grids, clouds, systems, and services. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 6296. Springer, Berlin, pp 105–115. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15681-6_8

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  46. Oh TH, Lim S, Choi YB, Park KR, Lee H, Choi H (2010) State of the art of network security perspectives in cloud computing. In: Kim Th, Stoica A, Chang RS (eds) Security-enriched urban computing and smart grid. Communications in computer and information science, vol 78. Springer, Berlin, pp 629–637. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-16444-6_79

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  47. Open Cloud Consortium. http://opencloudconsortium.org

  48. OpenNebula Project. http://www.opennebula.org

  49. Oracle Cloud Computing. http://oracle.com/us/technologies/cloud

  50. Plesser A. CC is hyped and overblown, Forrester’s Frank Gillett … Big tech companies have ‘cloud envy’. http://www.beet.tv/2008/09/cloud-computing.html(’08). Interview video. Visited: 2010, Apr 23

  51. Qian L, Luo Z, Du Y, Guo L (2009) Cloud computing: an overview. In: CloudCom’09: proceedings of the 1st international conference on cloud computing. Springer, Berlin, pp 626–631

    Google Scholar 

  52. R Project (2011) Reservoir fp7—resources and services virtualization without barriers—cloud computing. http://62.149.240.97/index.php?page=cloud-computing

  53. Rackspace Cloud. http://www.rackspacecloud.com

  54. RightScale. http://www.rightscale.com

  55. Rimal BP, Choi E, Lumb I (2009) A taxonomy and survey of cloud computing systems. In: NCM’09: proceedings of the 2009 fifth international joint conference on INC, IMS and IDC. IEEE Comp. Society, Washington, pp 44–51

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  56. Rochwerger B, Breitgand D, Levy E, Galis A, Nagin K, Llorente IM, Montero R, Wolfsthal Y, Elmroth E, Cáceres J, Emmerich W, Galán F (2009) The reservoir model and architecture for open federated cloud computing

  57. Salesforce.com. http://salesforce.com

  58. SmugMug. http://www.smugmug.com

  59. Tippit Inc. (2008) WebHostingUnleashed: Cloud-computing services comparison guide. http://www.itsj.com/Resources/cloud-computing-comparison.pdf. Visited: 2010, Feb 3

  60. Tsai WT, Sun X, Balasooriya J (2010) Service-oriented cloud computing architecture. In: 2010 seventh international conference on information technology: new generations, p 684. doi:10.1109/ITNG.2010.214

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  61. University of Chicago. Nimbus is cloud computing for science. http://www.nimbusproject.org

  62. Vaquero LM, Rodero-Merino L, Morán D (2011) Locking the sky: a survey on iaas cloud security. Computing 91(1):93. doi:10.1007/s00607-010-0140-x

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  63. Vecchiola C, Chu X, Buyya R. Aneka: a software platform for.net-based cloud computing. doi:10.1.1.147.5672

  64. Viega J (2009) Cloud computing and the common man. Computer 42:106–108

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Wang L, Laszewski G, Younge A, He X, Kunze M, Tao J, Fu C (2010) Cloud computing: a perspective study. New Gener Comput 28(2):137. doi:10.1007/s00354-008-0081-5

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  66. Weinhardt C, Anandasivam A, Blau B, Borissov N, Meinl T, Michalk W, Stößer J (2009) Cloud computing—a classification business models, and research directions. Bus Inf Syst Eng 1(5):391–399

    Article  Google Scholar 

  67. Weiss A (2007) Computing in the clouds. NetWorker 11(4):16–25

    Article  Google Scholar 

  68. Xia T, Li Z, Yu N (2009) Research on cloud computing based on deep analysis to typical platforms. In: CloudCom’09: proceedings of the 1st international conference on cloud computing. Springer, Berlin, pp 601–608

    Google Scholar 

  69. Yang B, Tan F, Dai YS (2011) Performance evaluation of cloud service considering fault recovery. J Supercomput. doi:10.1007/s11227-011-0551-2

    Google Scholar 

  70. Youseff L, Butrico M, Da Silva D (2008) Toward a unified ontology of cloud computing. In: Grid computing environments workshop, GCE’08, pp 1–10

    Google Scholar 

  71. Zhang Q, Cheng L, Boutaba R (2010) Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and research challenges. J Internet Serv Appl 1(1):7–18. doi:10.1007/s13174-010-0007-6

    Article  Google Scholar 

  72. Zimory GmbH. Building the flexible data center. http://zimory.com

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    C. N. Höfer & G. Karagiannis

Authors
  1. C. N. Höfer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. G. Karagiannis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to C. N. Höfer.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Höfer, C.N., Karagiannis, G. Cloud computing services: taxonomy and comparison. J Internet Serv Appl 2, 81–94 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13174-011-0027-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13174-011-0027-x

Keywords