Evaluating and Ranking Cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS Models Based on Functional and Non-Functional Key Performance Indicators

With the recent maturity of Cloud computing technology and the flexibility of the Cloud services, the offering of Cloud services has spread exponentially. Different Cloud service providers offer their services highlighting different performance indicators. Because of the diversity of Cloud services and their highlighted performance indicators, the selection of the most suitable Cloud service is a complex problem for the Cloud users. Many Cloud users are unable to identify the Cloud services that best suit their needs and thus choose an unsuitable Cloud service, which results in financial loses as well as time delays. To this end, in this study, we propose an efficient three layered framework for evaluating and ranking IaaS, PaaS and SaaS Cloud services. We identified the functional and non-functional key performance indicators (KPIs) for Cloud services from 6 KPI classes. We classified these KPIs with respect to their types and criticality so that the Cloud user can easily choose according to his needs. The relative importance of the KPIs was determined using CRITIC method. We combined the KPIs values and their relative importance for an overall evaluation and ranking of the Cloud services using Vikor method. A case study is also presented for a step by step demonstration of the proposed method.