Current Development, Challenges, and Future Trends in Cloud Computing: A Survey

Cloud computing is a new paradigm in information and communication technologies (ICTs) that provides the ability to access shared pools of different computing resources that are related to many cloud users within a pay-per-use or on-demand approach. It has transformed the delivery model of ICT from a product to a service. This provides several different advantages for institutions, companies and users based on savings and reduced capital expenditure through lower operating expenses. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cloud computing. It first develops an understanding of cloud computing in general and discusses its advantages, current development, challenges and future trends. Subsequently, a detailed discussion on the cloud computing architectures, services models, fault tolerance mechanisms, services selection methods, adoption by industry, and scheduling of cloud-based resources is also presented. Nonetheless, cloud computing has many obstacles which expose it to a number of limitations. Some of these challenges include security of data, fault tolerance, and load balancing. A number of techniques in literature are proposed to cope with these challenges which are discussed and analyzed. Experimental data and usage drift validates the popularity of cloud computing and its adoption in recent years. Future trends in cloud computing support the use of intelligent machine learning (ML) techniques and new technologies to cope with some of the challenges and making cloud computing more efficient, secure and commercially viable to be widely accepted.