Typical scientific, industrial and public sector applications require resource scalability and efficient resource utilization in order to serve a variable number of customers. Cloud computing provides an ideal solution to support such applications. However, the dynamic and intelligent utilization of cloud infrastructure resources from the perspective of cloud applications is not trivial. Although there have been several efforts to support the intelligent and coordinated deployment, and to a smaller extent also the run-time orchestration of cloud applications, no comprehensive solution has emerged until now that successfully leverages large scale near operational levels and ease of use. COLA is a European research project to provide a reference implementation of a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. Such applications can then be embedded into workflows or science gateway frameworks to support complex application scenarios from user-friendly interfaces. A specific aspect of the cloud orchestration framework developed by COLA is the ability to describe complex application architectures incorporating several services. Besides the description of service components, the framework will also support the definition of various Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to performance, economic viability and security. This paper concentrates on this latter aspect analysing how such application description templates can be developed based on existing standards and technologies
