The described technology is generally directed towards managing accounts for connecting applications to (e.g., third party) cloud storage providers. Various types of cloud storage providers and different accounts, e.g. corresponding to different usage scenarios with properties such as regions, storage tier levels, costs and so forth, are available to user applications. In one implementation, a user application provides desired account properties to a cloud credential manager via a REST API call to obtain the account information for an account, including credentials, configuration data and the like, returned in in a REST API response. The described technology facilitates selection of an account by the cloud credential manager based on matching the specified properties. Load balancing and storage costs can also be factors in the selection, and random selection is also available.