Abstract. Future Internet applications are becoming increasingly dynamic and can be composed of a wide range of services controlled and hosted by di erent stakeholders. This paper addresses the challenge of resource provisioning for applications that have speci c Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and where consumers of Cloud resources want to avoid lock-in to any speci c Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider. Application modelling can be used to predict performance of applications given certain resources, workload and con guration. However, application modelling is a signi cant challenge for Cloud consumers due to the limited and varying information IaaS providers disclose about infrastructure resources. We demonstrate in this paper how Dwarf benchmarks can be used as a uniform and informative way of characterising compute resources, which is successful for application modelling, achieving high prediction accuracy on a range of applications.