Managing the lifecycle of a cloud service modeled as a topology decorated by a number of policies includes with a processor, generating a topology or the realized topology, the topology or the realized topology representing a cloud service, associating a number of lifecycle management actions (LCMAs) with a number of nodes within the topology or the realized topology, and with a lifecycle management engine, updating the topology or the realized topology by associating a number of policies with the number of nodes within the topology or the realized topology.