A computer-implemented method of load balancing including calculating an expected cost set associated with an application-specific task of an application executing on a processing resource in a cloud computing environment, and communicating the expected cost set from the processing resource to a cloud management system. Resource mapping of applications currently executing in the cloud computing environment are retrieved, the application-specific task is assigned to a specific computational resource in the cloud computing environment based on the expected cost set and the resource mapping of applications currently executing in the cloud computing environment. A task to VM (virtual machine) assignment is determined based on the assignment of the application-specific task to the specific computational resource. The task to VM assignment is transferred from the cloud management system to the application executing on the processing resource in the cloud computing environment.