A Novel Taxonomy and Comparison Method for Ranking Cloud Computing Software Products

Cloud computing as a new and modern technology has become a focus of attention and a platform for future services. Cloud computing services have been categorized into three main groups of services, which are infrastructure, platform, and software. Each service has its own unique characteristic while all services have also some common characteristics and challenges. Such characteristics create a complicated combination of features to serve selection of cloud solutions. This paper presents a new feature based taxonomy which facilitates the process of cloud software product selection. More precisely, Hierarchical Cloud Taxonomy Engine is the proposed method to help developers and consumers choose their appropriate product according to their needs and based on real capabilities of different cloud computing products. Moreover, this paper proposes a new evaluation mechanism which sorts the cloud products according to the customer's needs and requirements. Besides, this paper presents a classification model for cloud features and subsequently presents a comparison between some business and research cloud products as a case study. Results of comparisons show that our proposed techniques facilitate the process of cloud product selection.