A cloud application management infrastructure models biological swarm behaviors to assign application resources to physical processing resources in a decentralized manner. A balanced and highly automated management of cloud infrastructure has a predictable and reliable response to changing resource loads by using a limited local rule set to define how application instances interact with available resources. Digital pheromone signals at physical resources are applied locally by a swarm module to determine if the physical resources provide an acceptable environment for an application and, if not, the application swarms to other environments until a suitable environment is found.