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Purpose: The main goal of this paper is to study the cloud service discovery mechanisms. In this paper, the discovery mechanisms are ranked in three major classes: centralized, decentralized, and hybrid. Moreover, in this classification, the peer-to-peer (P2P) and agent-based mechanisms are considered the parts of the decentralized mechanism. This paper investigates the main improvements in these three main categories and outlines new challenges. Moreover, the other goals are analyzing the current challenges in a range of problem areas related to cloud discovery mechanisms and summarizing the discussed service discovery techniques. Design/methodology/approach: Systematic literature review (SLR) is utilized to detect, evaluate and combine findings from related investigations. The SLR consists of two key stages in this paper: question formalization and article selection processes. The latter includes three steps: automated search, article selection and analysis of publication. These investigations solved one or more service discovery research issues and performed a general study of an experimental examination on cloud service discovery challenges. Findings: In this paper, a parametric comparison of the discovery methods is suggested. It also demonstrates future directions and research opportunities for cloud service discovery. This survey will help researchers understand the advances made in cloud service discovery directly. Furthermore, the performed evaluations have shown that some criteria such as security, robustness and reliability attained low attention in the previous studies. The results also showed that the number of cloud service discovery–related articles rose significantly in 2020. Research limitations/implications: This research aimed to be comprehensive, but there were some constraints. The limitations that the authors have faced in this article are divided into three parts. Articles in which service discovery was not the primary purpose and their title did not include the related terms to cloud service discovery were also removed. Also, non-English articles and conference papers have not been reviewed. Besides, the local articles have not been considered. Practical implications: One of the most critical cloud computing topics is finding appropriate services depending on consumer demand in real-world scenarios. Effective discovery, finding and selection of relevant services are necessary to gain the best efficiency. Practitioners can thus readily understand various perspectives relevant to cloud service discovery mechanisms. This paper's findings will also benefit academicians and provide insights into future study areas in this field. Besides, the drawbacks and benefits of the analyzed mechanisms have been analyzed, which causes the development of more efficient and practical mechanisms for service discovery in cloud environments in the future. Originality/value: This survey will assist academics and practical professionals directly in their understanding of developments in service discovery mechanisms. It is a unique paper investigating the current and important cloud discovery methods based on a logical categorization to the best of the authors' knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]