SUMMARY Cloud computing infrastructure services enable the flexible creation of virtual infrastructures on‐demand. However, the creation of infrastructures is only a part of the process for provisioning services. Other steps such as installation, deployment, configuration, monitoring and management of software components are needed to fully provide services to end‐users in the cloud. This paper describes a peer‐to‐peer architecture to automatically deploy services on cloud infrastructures. The architecture uses a component repository to manage the deployment of these software components, enabling elasticity by using the underlying cloud infrastructure provider. The life cycle of these components is described in this paper, as well as the language for defining them. We also describe the open‐source proof‐of‐concept implementation. Some technical information about this implementation together with some statistical results are also provided. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.