Methods and apparatus to scale in and/or scale out arbitrary resources managed by a cloud automation system are disclosed. An example apparatus includes an execution plan determiner to determine an execution plan for a scaling operation of an application in a platform environment based on a dependency graph; a component scaler to scale a scalable component in the platform environment corresponding to the application based on the execution plan by executing custom logic associated with the scalable component specified in the execution plan; and a dependent updater to update operation of a dependent component based on the scaling of the scalable component, the dependent component operating in conjunction with the scalable component.