Cloud services and applications prove indispensable amid today’s modern utility-based computing. The cloud has displayed a disruptive and growing impact on everyday computing tasks. However, facilitating the orchestration of cloud resources to build such cloud services and applications is yet to unleash its entire magnitude of power. Accordingly, it is paramount to devise a unified and comprehensive analysis framework to accelerate fundamental understanding of cloud resource orchestration in terms of concepts, paradigms, languages, models, and tools. This framework is essential to empower effective research, comprehension, comparison, and selection of cloud resource orchestration models, languages, platforms, and tools. This article provides such a comprehensive framework while analyzing the relevant state of the art in cloud resource orchestration from a novel and holistic viewpoint.