Abstract. This paper presents an optimization framework for finding efficient deployment mappings of replicated service components (to nodes), while accounting for multiple services simultaneously and adhering to non-functional requirements. Currently, we consider load-balancing and dependability requirements. Our approach is based on a variant of Ant Colony Optimization and is completely decentralized, where ants communicate indirectly through pheromone tables in nodes. In this paper, we target scalability; however, existing encoding schemes for the pheromone tables did not scale. Hence, we propose and evaluate three different pheromone encodings. Using the most scalable encoding, we evaluate our approach in a significantly larger system than our previous work. We also evaluate the approach in terms of robustness to network partition failures.