A survey of resource provisioning problem in cloud brokers

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud computing the cloud market has become heterogeneous. In order to avoid this problem becoming an obstacle for users to migrate to cloud computing, cloud brokers have emerged as a third party to provide more advantageous cloud services to users, which can help users ignore the differences between multiple cloud providers. For cloud brokers, whose fundamental function is provisioning resources which are typically not owned by themselves, it is challenging to select and manage resources in a complex and heterogeneous cloud environment. This paper presents a survey of the resource provisioning problem in cloud brokers, by firstly introducing a representative study of cloud broker architecture, then classifying the resource provisioning problem into resource selection problem and resource management problem and discussing them separately. In this survey, a new taxonomy of cloud broker research is proposed, and an analysis of existing research is given at the end along with an outlook on future research directions and some open problems in cloud brokerage. We hope this paper can provide help and guidance for researchers interested in cloud brokers.