1. A method, comprising: creating a composite manifest that identifies a plurality of service groups that are components of a composite application, each of the service groups associated with one or more policies, the composite manifest comprising: (i) a service manifest including service metadata, wherein the service metadata includes service type, health properties, pertinent load balancing metrics, service binaries, and service configuration files, (ii) an application manifest including service composition metadata, wherein the service composition metadata includes stable names, partitioning scheme, instance count and replication factor, security and isolation policy, placement constraints, configuration overrides, service types of constituent services, and load balancing domains into which the constituent services are placed, and (iii) a cluster manifest including physical infrastructure metadata, wherein the physical infrastructure metadata includes machine names, machine types and description, network topology, and upgrade domains; identifying the constituent services based upon the application manifest; deploying the identified constituent services on a plurality of nodes, wherein each node is identified based upon the cluster manifest, each node comprising a host operating system running on a processor; managing the composite application by controlling the services on the plurality of nodes based, at least in part, upon a load balancing operation specified in the service manifest; monitoring an operation of the constituent services; and reporting on a performance of a monitored operation, wherein the composite application includes an online shopping application comprising at least: a shopping service, a checkout service, a caching service, and an order processing service.