1. A cloud controller of a cloud computing cluster, the cloud controller comprising: a processor; a compute service module to receive a request for a new virtual machine; a communication module to receive a plurality of contention scores for a plurality of compute nodes of the cloud computing cluster, wherein each contention score of the plurality of contention scores indicates cache memory contention of a corresponding compute node of the plurality of compute nodes; and a scheduler module to select a compute node from the plurality of compute nodes based on the corresponding contention score; wherein the compute service module is further to schedule the new virtual machine on the selected compute node; and wherein the contention score comprises a contention score level indicative of a contention metric of the compute node, wherein the contention score level comprises a categorization of a magnitude of the contention metric, the contention score level being determined by a comparison of a rate of cache misses of the compute node per reference number of instructions of the compute node to one or more threshold values, and wherein the contention score level comprises: (i) a low contention level indicative of the rate of cache misses per reference number of instructions being less than a low contention threshold value, (ii) a medium contention level indicative of the rate of cache misses per reference number of instructions being greater than or equal to the low contention threshold value and less than a high contention threshold value, or (iii) a high contention level indicative of the rate of cache misses per reference number of instructions being greater than or equal to the high contention threshold value.