Methods and apparatus are disclosed to scale application deployments in cloud computing environments using virtual machine pools. An example method disclosed herein includes displaying a user-selectable control to specify whether the application is to be scaled in accordance with a scaling policy, based on selection of the user-selectable control, storing, in a blueprint of the application, an indication of whether the application is to be scaled in accordance with the scaling policy, based on the indication in the blueprint, preparing a virtual machine pool in the computing environment, the virtual machine pool including a virtual machine provisioned for use in a scaling operation, in response to a request to scale the application deployed in a deployment environment, determining whether configuration information satisfies a scaling requirement, and based on the determination, performing the scaling operation in accordance with the request to scale by transferring the virtual machine to the deployment environment.