A survey of cloud computing taxonomies: Rationale and overview

The Cloud Computing (CC) as a field is progressing by leaps and bounds. In order to organize the knowledge on this newly flourishing field, numerous taxonomies have been proposed over the last few years. A well-developed cloud taxonomy aims to support researchers and practitioners from academia and industry by organizing cloud computing-concepts and terminology. It provides researchers with a tool to focus on the aspects that eliminate research gaps. This paper presents a survey of the existing cloud computing taxonomies for various purposes. We aim to enable the readers to better understand the state-of-the-art of cloud computing and categorize the existing cloud computing related taxonomies into three classes: conceptual, performance and security taxonomies. This classification will help readers to find out different perspectives in cloud computing taxonomies. We infer that current endeavors in CC taxonomy have not yet extensively explored all aspects of the emerging field.