The present disclosure describes a plurality of examples for deploying an application workload consisting of micro-service instances. The examples include federating a cluster from a plurality of computing nodes, defining a network overlay policy based on an application policy associated with the application workload, configuring one or more virtual networks in accordance with defined network overlay policy, each virtual network from one or more virtual networks connects one or more computing nodes from the two or more computing nodes of the cluster for providing layer 2 adjacency, and deploying the plurality of micro-service instances on the two or more computing nodes in accordance with the network overlay policy, for executing the application workload.