A systematic review and conceptual roadmap for sky computing: AI-enabled orchestration, interoperability, and governance beyond multi-cloud

Abstract

The concept of sky computing is becoming known as an industry-independent “cloud of clouds” approach intended to address the issues of fragmentation inherent in today’s multi-cloud and hybrid cloud implementations. The objective of this systematic literature review is to examine the challenge of existing multi-cloud architectures, which despite delivering high reliability and purchasing flexibility, suffer from API heterogeneity, fragmented intercloud orchestration, insufficient workload mobility, and unresolved sovereignty and compliance challenges. Based on the PRISMA methodology, 325 papers released between January 2020 and June 2025 have been systematically selected in five scientific databases: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink, ScienceDirect, and Scopus. Upon applying a process of elimination for duplicates, title-and-abstract screening, full-text evaluation, and quality assessment, a total of 35 peer-reviewed publications from the same timeframe have been thematically analyzed. Four thematic areas were examined: architectural architecture, intercloud orchestration, automation through artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), and security, privacy, and compliance. Not a single article predating the year 2020 was part of the final systematic literature review (SLR) database or bibliography. The results reveal that compatibility layers and intercloud brokers increase portability of workloads; scheduling based on artificial intelligence is useful in automating operations and achieving optimal cost performance; while zero trust architecture, self-sovereign identity, confidential computing, and policy-driven compliance are key in achieving trustworthy cross jurisdictional operations. The two major conclusions that arise from this study are: Firstly, future studies need to investigate explainability and energy-efficient AI orchestration in a real-world setting with multiple cloud providers, whereas secondly, cloud computing professionals need to incorporate principles of privacy, sovereignty, and compliance directly into the orchestration policies, not as an afterthought.