A mechanism is provided for deploying software applications in a cloud computing environment. An administrator is provided an interface for allowing a software application that is designed for a single tenant to be used by a plurality of users. An aspect of the invention is to provide a mechanism for quickly and easily giving multi-user qualities to a single tenant application like autoCAD. As such, multiple users can access the application without the need to download and install a version locally on their system. The system is able to determine the period of time for which an application is in use for a given user, because every application is run on a resource that is part of the cloud environment. Therefore, it is possible for the application provider to charge for the application in a usage-based model—e.g. by the hour, or day—without any re-engineering of the existing application.