Provided are methods and systems for facilitating selection of a cloud configuration for deploying an application program with high accuracy, low overhead, and automatic adaptivity to a broad spectrum of applications and cloud configurations. The methods and systems are designed for building a performance model of cloud configurations, where the performance model is capable of distinguishing an optimal cloud configuration or a near-optimal cloud configuration from other possible configurations, but without requiring the model to be accurate for every cloud configuration. By tolerating the inaccuracy of the model for some configurations (but keeping the accuracy of the final result) it is possible to achieve both low overhead and automatic adaptivity: only a small number of samples may be needed and there is no need to embed application-specific insights into the modeling.