Systems described herein operate to improve network performance in a multi-tenant cloud computing environment. Systems can include communication circuitry and processing circuitry to generate a phase sequence matrix that indicates the identity and number of phases of a workload by measuring resources of the compute node during execution of the workload throughout a lifetime of the workload. The processing circuitry can generate a workload fingerprint that includes the phase sequence matrix and a phrase residency matrix. The phase residency matrix can indicate the fraction of execution time of the workload spent in each phase identified in the phase sequence matrix. A cloud controller can access the workload fingerprint for multiple workloads operating on multiple compute nodes in the cloud cluster to adjust workload allocations based at least on these workload fingerprints and on whether service level objectives (SLOs) are being met.