International audienceCloud computing offers the possibility to build sophisticated software systems on virtualized infrastructures at a fraction of the cost necessary just few years ago, but deploying/maintaining/reconfiguring such software systems is a serious challenge. The main objective of the Aeolus project, an initiative funded by ANR (the French "Agence Nationale de la Recherche"), is to tackle the scientific problems that need to be solved in order to ease the problem of efficient and cost-effective deployment and administration of the complex distributed architectures which are at the heart of cloud applications