Controlling live migration of a running application between a source machine and a target machine is provided. At least one application characteristic and at least one network characteristic are obtained. An objective function that defines a cost to migrate from the source machine to the target machine as a function such as a weighted combination of at least one cost property is obtained. The objective function is optimized using the at least one application characteristic and the at least one network characteristic to determine a policy specifying when to switch execution of the running application from the source machine to the target machine. Live migration of the application from the source machine is controlled to send pages from the source machine to the target machine in accordance with the policy, and to switch the execution of the application from the source machine to the target machine at a state specified by the policy.