Cloud computing is continuously growing as a business model for hosting information and communications technology applications. While the on-demand resource consumption and faster deployment time make this model appealing for the enterprise, other concerns arise regarding the quality of service offered by the cloud. The placement strategy of the virtual machines hosting the applications has a tremendous effect on the High Availability of the services provided by these applications hosted in the cloud. Systems and methods for scaling a virtualized application that take into consideration the interdependencies between the components of the applications and other constraints such as the communication delay tolerance and resource utilization are provided.