Analysis of web-scale cloud services

Cloud services have unique characteristics, including dynamic and diverse service offerings at different levels, few standardized description languages, and varied deployment platforms. Searching such services is thus challenging. The authors' cloud service crawler engine collects metadata about 5,883 cloud services over the Web after parsing more than half a million possible links. An extensive statistical analysis on this data gives an overall view of cloud service provisioning's current status. Intriguing findings from this investigation include the scarcity of standardization in cloud computing, and the lack of evidence for strong cloud computing support from established service-oriented computing technologies. The findings offer a better understanding of the current status of cloud service provisioning, and the datasets collected from this study will benefit the cloud research community.