Cloud Computing is all about delivering services over the Internet. It has some technical, business and economical aspects. The complexity of service provisioning has increased significantly with the increasing number of cloud services and their providers. This creates a complex situation and as a result the service provisioning techniques face hurdles. The challenge of service provisioning is to properly offer services by adjusting the complexities efficiently. There are significant works to solve the problem in different manners. But still there are some gaps that are to be noticed and bridged for future advancement of cloud technology research. In this paper an attempt has been made for analyzing the service provisioning techniques from different perspectives. The said perspectives are various techniques and methodologies, QoS parameter considered, context awareness, etc. Moreover, the role of a broker in this context is also addressed. The overall motivation is to identify the open challenges, that may provide a future research direction in context of service provisioning. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017.