A user management construct, referred to as a persona, is provided to enable a flexible mechanism that grants elevated or administrative privileges to users, such as application developers. Developers may utilize the privileges bestowed by a persona to execute tasks that normally requires access by traditional information (IT) roles, such as IT administrators, to deploy applications in a cloud computing environment. The tasks may include the provisioning of virtual or physical computing resources and/or the configuration of compute, storage, and networking resources.