Abstract: The present invention relates to a system for managing the computing resources of a cloud computing platform comprising a plurality of Virtual Machine (VM) clusters each comprising a plurality of Virtual Machine (VM) instances, each configured to run at least one software application instance. The system comprises a monitoring module configured for determining a resource utilisation value for each VM instance and an elasticity module configured for adjusting the number of VM instances and/or software application instances in the VM cluster. The monitoring module is configured to determine, based on the user requests received at the communication interface, a cluster resource utilisation value, which is used by the elasticity module to adjust the number of VM instances and/or software application instances to maintain the resource utilisation value of each VM instance within the target value range.