Cloud computing is a paradigm that ensures the flexible, convenient and on-demand provisioning of a shared pool of configurable network and computing resources. Its services can be offered by either private or public infrastructures, depending on who owns the operational infrastructure. Much research has been conducted to improve a cloud’s resource provisioning techniques. Unfortunately, sometimes an abrupt increase in the demand for cloud services results in resource shortages affecting both providers and consumers. This uncertainty of resource demands by users can lead to catastrophic failures of cloud systems, thus reducing the number of accepted service requests. In this paper, we present Bouncer—a workload admission control scheme for cloud services. Bouncer works by ensuring that cloud services do not exceed the cloud infrastructure’s threshold capacity. By adopting an application-aware approach, we implemented Bouncer on software-defined network (SDN) infrastructure. Furthermore, we conduct an extensive study to evaluate our framework’s performance. Our evaluation shows that Bouncer significantly outperforms the conventional service admission control schemes, which are still state of the art.