A Systematic Review of Cloud Lock-in Solutions

The heterogeneity of cloud semantics, technology and interfaces limits application and platform portability and interoperability, and can easily lead to vendor lock-in. We identify, analyse and classify existing solutions to cloud vendor lock-in, and highlight unresolved challenges. Our survey is based on a systematic review of 721 primary studies that describe the state-of-the-art in managing cloud lock-in, portability and interoperability. 78 of these primary studies were selected and used for a thorough analysis of cloud standards, commercial products and academic work related to cloud lock-in. Our review shows that most solutions proposed so far are platforms, APIs or architectures addressing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) interoperability. From our review, we identify a need for: (i) exploiting established solutions from areas that are closely related to cloud computing; (ii) increasing empirical evidence to raise confidence in existing solutions; and (iii) addressing the socio-technical and business challenges related to cloud lock-in.