Techniques are disclosed for allocation of resources in a distributed computing system. For example, a method for allocating a set of one or more components of an application to a set of one or more resource groups includes the following steps performed by a computer system. The set of one or more resource groups is ordered based on respective failure measures and resource capacities associated with the one or more resource groups. An importance value is assigned to each of the one or more components, wherein the importance value is associated with an affect of the component on an output of the application. The one or more components are assigned to the one or more resource groups based on the importance value of each component and the respective failure measures and resource capacities associated with the one or more resource groups, wherein components with higher importance values are assigned to resource groups with lower failure measures and higher resource capacities. The application may be a partial fault tolerant (PFT) application that comprises a set of one or more PFT application components. The set of one or more resource groups may comprise a heterogeneous set of resource groups (or clusters).