Chapter 2 Cloud Service Offer Selection

In the application economy, digital business initiatives are at the forefront of the growth strategy of many companies. Cloud based solutions offer a significant competitive advantage for both large companies and SMEs, leading to a rapid increase in the number of Cloud Service Providers (CSP). An important CSP driver is the improvement of consumers’ experience through digital platforms that allow users to access data and services from any location and through multiple channels with assured performance and availability. This is usually studied from a single provider perspective, ignoring the growing number ofmulti-Cloud applications that use different Cloud services from different Cloud service providers. Beyond the usual Cloud services and providers, the interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) and fog computing is growing very fast as it is seen as an opportunity to launch innovative new services in the very near future. With the market growth and the increase in the number of components and applications in modern systems, the complexity of software systems implemented in multi-Cloud environments increases exponentially. Making decisions in the new era of multi-Cloud applications becomes one of the next challenges.