Systems and methods for performing discovery of hosts to be employed for hosting containerized applications. An example method may comprise: transmitting, to a host management service employed to manage at least one of: a plurality of host computer systems or a plurality of virtual machines running on one or more host computer systems, a host discovery request comprising a host definition rule (e.g., defining an amount of available memory, a networking configuration parameter, a storage configuration parameter, or a processor type identifier); receiving, from the host management service, an identifier of a host that satisfies the host definition rule; and providing the identifier of the host to a container orchestration service employed to instantiate and run, on one or more hosts, a plurality of containerized applications.