Towards a Visualization Framework for Service Selection in Cloud E-Marketplaces

In spite of the success of many commercial cloud service e-marketplaces, the search results from these platforms are usually presented as an unordered list of icons representing the services that best fit users' keyword-based queries. The drawback of such presentation mechanisms is that users are not able to immediately discriminate among the cloud services for easy decision making. A number of cloud service selection frameworks have been proposed, however, some of these frameworks do not enable users to make comparisons among services. In this paper, we introduce a visualization framework for cloud service selection. Our framework takes into cognizance the set of cloud services that matches a user's request and based on QoS attributes, users can interact with the results via bubble graph visualization to compare and contrast the search results to ascertain the best alternative. The bubble graph enables the exploration of services in a unified view of the QoS space, exhibiting both high object coherence and correlation. The result from our experiments shows that our framework simplifies decision making as users can identify services that best fit their requirements quicker and easier compared to tabular formats.