Analysis and Representation of QoS Attributes in Cloud Service Selection

Cloud service selection is complicated by the prospect that there exist a large number of services and each service is characterized by multiple QoS attributes. Various commercial tools have been developed in order to help cloud consumers with selecting best cloud services. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the three commercial cloud service selection tools as well as the way they represent QoS attributes. Accordingly, it proposes a new model that succinctly represents QoS attributes which cloud consumers can easily use (and understand) when selecting cloud services. The proposed model also classifies the QoS attributes into four main categories of technical, strategic & organizational, economic and political & legislative. These QoS attributes can also be seamlessly fed into the multi-criteria decision (e.g., MCDM) - which compares and ranks different QoS attributes of multiple alternatives in order to decide which services are most suitable for cloud consumers.