Systems and methods for policy-driven capacity management in a resource provisioning environment, the method comprising storing, in an operational database one or more virtual resource sets (VRSs) and elasticity ranges for components to be deployed in a resource provisioning environment, and probabilistic guarantees on the elasticity ranges defined in a service manifest provided by a service subscriber; collecting historical data about capacity usage in the resource provisioning environment and failure statistics from the operational database, in addition to prior service commitments due to previously contracted service level agreements (SLAs) stored in a SLA repository; calculating equivalent capacity for the resource provisioning environment based on a defined residual benefit goal, and other business goals instrumented by way of a policy engine; and placing requested virtual resources on physical resources, in response to determining that sufficient physical capacity is available to host the calculated equivalent capacity.