In order to satisfy end-user requirements, many scientific and commercial applications require access to dynamically adjustable infrastructure resources. Cloud computing has the potential to provide these dynamic capabilities. However, utilising these capabilities from application code is not trivial and requires application developers to understand low-level technical details of clouds. This paper investigates how a generic framework can be developed that supports the dynamic orchestration of cloud applications both at deployment and at run-time. The advantages and challenges of designing such framework based on microservices is analysed, and a generic framework, called MiCADO – (Microservices-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) is proposed. A first prototype implementation of MiCADO to support data intensive commercial web applications is also presented
