Technology for selecting job characteristics to determine the similarity among jobs in terms of performance. Technology based on similarity among jobs calculated by selected characteristics for determining jobs that are likely to lead to successful performance of a requested new job by a cloud. Also, technology based on similarity among jobs calculated by selected characteristics for determining jobs that are likely to lead to failure when performing a requested new job by the cloud. When the new job request is accepted, because its characteristics of the new job matches job characteristics characterized by success and/or fails to match job characteristics characterized by failure, then the new job is said to lead to a “reward” or an “expected reward” because the new job will be rewarded by being allowed to use, by an admission controller of a cloud management system, use of cloud computing resources of the cloud.