The present application is directed towards systems and methods for adaptive application provisioning for cloud services. An appliance deployed in a network as a gateway may be able to transparently monitor application activity in a cloud computing environment provided by one or more servers, including servers executed by virtual machines, bare-metal or non-virtual servers, or other computing devices. In some embodiments, the appliance may monitor one or more network metrics, including bandwidth usage, latency, congestion, or other issues; and/or may monitor application health or server or virtual machine statistics, including memory and processor usage, bandwidth usage, latency, or other metrics. Responsive to one or more metrics exceeding a threshold, the appliance may automatically provision or start, or deprovision or shut down, one or more virtual or physical machines from a cloud service provider, and may provide configuration information to the provisioned or started machines as needed.